Only The Good Die Young
by AlreadyPainfullyGone
Summary: Post Season 7 Purgatory Fic - In a place where there's no time, no hope and no food, Dean ends up depending on Castiel a lot. And realises just how much the angel is prepared to give him. Really it's just a question of of what's being lent, and what's a permanent gift.
1. Chapter 1

_So, I've been thinking about writing a Purgatory fic for...since the finale, but I didn't want to just jump right into it. I've thought about it, and basically, this is my twisted idea of what happens. Sorry it's a short first chapter – I'm so close to finishing my novel that I can taste it, and that's what I want to be doing right now. _

Dean hasn't felt this frightened in a long time.

Scared, yes. He's been scared. Scared of losing Sam, scared of dying, of letting everyone in the world get carved up in a slaughterhouse – yeah, that's the kind of stuff that'd scare anybody.

Being frightened however, is for kids. Fear is irrational, and dangerous. It's ok to be scared, that's just nerves, it's your brain talking to your body, telling you that you're about to do something fucking crazy, or you're walking into a trap. Being scared is having a brain that works.

Fear though, fear'll get you killed.

Especially in a forest full of monsters. Especially in a forest a million miles across, pitch dark, full of legions of monsters that have been gathering here since the dawn of time. Full of monsters that are already dead. Monsters he couldn't kill even if they could be killed, because he's got one knife and a gun with almost no bullets left, and splintered bit of useless bone.

Oh yeah, and his one hope has just flittered off, after telling him he was going to get torn to pieces.

So, Dean is fucking scared, but he can feel that edge of fear coming, the dangerous kind of fear that makes smart men dumb, and leads seasoned hunters right into the jaws of death.

A sharp, wet, crack cuts though the air, and makes his heart jump like a thousand volts of electricity. A screech follows that makes him look around wildly. He widens his eyes, trying to see in the dark, brings up a hand to cover his mouth and nose, cutting out the sound of his breathing so he can listen.

Another crack – the unmistakable sound of a violent, messy, dismembering. A piteous howl cuts through the air.

Scuffles, hard thuds of flesh against flesh.

Something makes an awful sound, somewhere between animal rage and human hate.

Crack number three silences it.

Dean waits in the silence, fear riding his every nerve. He's going to die. He knows it.

Castiel appears at his elbow, and Dean flinches away, almost jumping an inch in the air. He turns and glares at the angel, heart still hiccupping in his chest, only to see that Castiel is spattered in blood, and his hands are gloved in it.

"Cas?"

"That was...most unfortunate." Castiel says, looking down at his hands, and cleaning the blood away with a thought.

"You killed it?"

Castiel still looks shaken. "I did as best as I could. This is purgatory, and everything here is already as dead as it ever will be...but the creatures here can still be...damaged."

An angry, pitiable howl comes from the trees to their left.

"You mean..." Dean looks at the trees, "that thing's still alive? You just..."

Castiel looks sick, an expression Dean has never seen on his face. "made sure it couldn't get up again."

And with that, Dean is well and truly frightened.

(-* -)

Purgatory is vast, but empty. Unlike heaven and hell, there is no need for there to be anything in purgatory – no roads, or remembered houses and bars, no racks and pits – just miles and miles and miles of dark forest. A zoo for the most dangerous animals the world had ever known.

"Officially, that is, according to the Bible," Castiel says in a hushed voice as they sit at the base of a tree some miles from the creature Castiel had 'neutralized' planning their next move, "Purgatory is a waiting ground, somewhere souls come to be contained until they are placed either in heaven, or hell."

"I'm guessing that's not what happens?"

Castiel shakes his head, "No creature has ever entered heaven, or hell. God created heaven and earth, and purgatory was a place he made to contain Leviathan. Lucifer shaped hell, and so demons and damned souls go there, pure souls go to heaven...and, Eve's creations go to purgatory, because they belong nowhere else."

"So if I'd been stuck a vamp..."

"This is where you would have ended up."

"Great." Dean looks around them, unable to stop scanning the trees for danger, when danger is all that's around them. "and we can't kill them?"

"No," Castiel agrees, "they prey on each other, and though the damage they do is lasting, even unto disembowelment, decapitation, bisection..."

"Please stop," Dean says, "I get it, they get hurt, but they'll stay living, even if you cut 'em into slurry."

Castiel doesn't speak again, and Dean realises that's because he told him to 'stop' without giving him something else to talk about. He's trying to get used to Cas not being Cas anymore.

"Are we getting out of here any time soon?"

Castiel shrugs. "We might."

"OK, so how do we do that?"

"We don't do anything," Castiel tells him. "Purgatory is a prison – unlike heaven and hell it's doors only open from outside. We cannot get out, only an outsider can reach in and set us free."

"So what do we do?" Dean asks, angry, frustrated, and still incredibly afraid. "while we wait for God or Sam or _Meg _to bust us out?"

Castiel looks grimly out into the darkness, his face suddenly looking much older. "We survive."

And Dean is so far beyond scared that all he can feel is a frozen lump in his chest.

(-*-)

A couple of hours later (though it's difficult to judge with the forest still being dark, and his watch having given up the ghost when they jumped dimensions or however they'd gotten here) Dean asks a question. He hasn't been waiting to ask it, but it suddenly occurs to him, and the unpleasantness of it makes him say it aloud.

"Am I going to starve to death?"

Castiel turns to look at him, until now he's been glumly meditating on the tree line. "Quite possibly."

Dean thought about that for a while, leaning back against the tree and trying not to give in to panic.

He wasn't even aware that he'd fallen into an exhausted sleep until Castiel shook him awake. Dean opened his eyes and looked into the worried face of the angel.

"What?" he mumbled.

"Dean, you were asleep for over seventy-two hours." Castiel tells him, "I thought it best to wake you."

Dean shivers, he's suddenly extremely hungry, not surprising given that he's been asleep for three days.

"Why did I sleep so long?" he says, trying to get upright and finding that his legs are shaking.

Castiel takes his arm and pulls him into a sitting position, easily propping him up against the tree.

"There's no way to tell time here, your body must have been unable to keep track of how long you'd been unconscious."

"And nothing attacked us?"

Castiel looked grim, a shadow slicing across his face. "I've moved us thirty nine times."

Dean looked around at the trees, they looked identical to the ones that had surrounded them before. He shifts, and only then does he realise that he's covered in Castiel's coat. He's too tired to move it away, and he doesn't want to – what would be the point? It would only make things more strained between them.

"How'd you know I was out so long?"

"I counted."

"What?"

"Seconds." Castiel looks frustrated, "it was tiresome."

Unconsciously, Dean lets his eyes flutter shut again.

Castiel shakes him again.

"Hey," Dean whines,

"Stay awake." Castiel tells him.

Dean tries.

(-*-)

"I'm hungry," he says, about an hour later. It's really hard to gauge time, but it feels like a lengthy stretch has passed, so why not call it an hour?

"I don't have anything to feed you."

"So, are we just gonna sit here while I die?" Dean mutters, blinking his tired eyes.

Castiel thinks for a while. "No."

Dean's hunger gets steadily worse, and though he tries to sleep through it, Castiel keeps waking him up every six or seven 'hours' and telling him that he's slept long enough. The trees around them grow blurrier, and Dean can't focus on them, or his own thoughts anymore. He has no idea how long it's been since he last ate. He's also thirsty, and so bone tired he can barely think.

He wakes up from one particularly long sleep and the first thing he sees is Castiel's bloody wrist in front of his face.

"Drink," he orders.

Dean turns his face away with a gruff sound of dissent.

Castiel's other hand touches the side of his face, bringing him back to the sight of the blood crawling down over Castiel's pale hand.

"Dean, this is all I have for you – drink it."

And Dean does. God help him, he's too weak to put up much resistance. He leans forward, and, after a messy few seconds in which he can't quite find the wound under all the blood, he latches on, and sucks hard. The blood tastes like blood, and it's disgusting. Hot and bitter and not something he'd ever have put into his mouth by choice. But he swallows, and the ache in his stomach dissipates a fraction.

After a while Castiel draws his wrist away, and Dean wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, feeling sick and shaky, but a little less feeble. He's only just begun to notice the weird fluttering in his veins, the flaring and fading of energy under his skin, when he passes out.

Dean's dreams are fucking crazy.

He can _hear_ light for starters. Which is new. It burns and deafens in one, but...somehow he can hear it talking, in a way he can't really understand. It pulses, intones with a deliberate voice. But when he tries to shout and tell it to stop, because it's hurting his head to listen, his own words come out in the same way – a kind of...frequency, like Hell's unturned radio. Scratching a crying and screeching.

There's more light in front of him than anywhere else, and it's shimmying back and forwards. It goes on forever, deep, but also tall – taller than Dean and taller than a telephone pole. As tall as a skyscraper.

And that, more than anything is what clues him in.

"Cas?" it's a thought, not a word, but the light grows brighter. There are little black holes in it, long tears that open into a starless night. No, not tears – just places where the light isn't. Like the light is skin, holding all that darkness in.

Dean's aware of himself now, he's a kind of seed sized spark. A ball of light, sort of like something he's seen before.

A soul.

That's it. Like the soul that Death had put back into Sam. He's just a soul. One soul.

It seems only natural, only inevitable, that he should move (because he can move now, and it's so easy. Easier than even breathing) into one of those long, black tears, a gateway into the light, into the darkness in it. He's just getting there, and the huge Cas-light is humming, a hum of tormented bees streaming from their hive, when a hand on his forehead jolts him awake.

For the second time in recent memory, he finds himself looking up into Castiel's face. The darkness of the forest is so deep after the searing light, that for a while, Dean had the afterimage of Castiel's true form burnt onto his retinas, a slowly fading bruise of light that pulses in front of his eyes.

Castiel's face is drawn and pale, and Dean notices with surprise that there's sweat on it.

"No, Dean." Castiel says, and Dean gets the sense that this was what all the humming was about. Castiel hadn't wanted him to get inside the light. Inside of _him_, Dean realises with a jolt. What the hell had he been doing? Trying to get inside of Cas?

"What the hell was that?" Dean rasps, moving away from Castiel clumsily, "and don't 'No, Dean' me, you put me somewhere like that, you can't blame me for freaking out."

"I didn't put you anywhere." Castiel says, and characteristically doesn't tell him exactly what it was that he had done. "When you next take my blood, just rest there, and resist the compulsion to..." he trails off.

Dean doesn't ask what it was he was actually doing, for some reason he now feels embarrassed about it. Whatever it was had clearly freaked Castiel out.

"Fine," he bites out, "but I hope Sam gets us out of here before I have to go vamp on you again. That was trippy as fuck."

Castiel doesn't disagree.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean is stubborn as hell when he wants to be.

As guilty as he feels about breaking when he was in the pit, he knows that he could have given in sooner. Thirty years was all he had in him, under torture, tricks, and all Alistair's wiles. But it was still thirty years. Not as long as his dad, sure, but (and he almost hates himself for thinking it) longer than Sam would've lasted. Hell, he'd fallen under Ruby's spell in less time than it had taken Alistair to peel Dean's spine bare and crack each vertebrae open to release the marrow.

So, Dean knows he can resist anything, for a good long while. Even if that something is relief.

He also knows that it takes about a month to starve a grown man to death, but without water, without proper sleep. Dean's confident he'll be dead in seven days.

There's no way, no way in all hell, heaven and purgatory, that he's becoming the kind of monster that Ruby made of Sam. He's not blind to the parallels here, and he's not going to live on some creature's blood for god knows how long, just so he can survive. If he's meant to die, he will.

Unfortunately for Dean, Castiel is stubborn too.

He lets Dean go three 'days' without sustenance. Three days of his silent presence, his offer of relief from the cramping hunger and dizzying lack of water. He asks Dean once a day if he's hungry, and Dean replies tightly that he isn't.

Castiel looks at him with a mixture of worry and anger. But whether he's angry 'cause he's worried, or worried because he's angry, Dean can't tell.

On the fourth 'day', Dean can't actually get up.

They're been walking through the forest, finding safe places and staying there until Castiel senses something coming for them. But when Dean wakes up, he finds that he's shivering too much to get to his feet and stay on them. Being on edge the whole time is taking what little strength he has.

Castiel is holding his wrist in front of Dean's mouth before the hunter can worry that he's too weak to fight.

He pushes the angel's hand away and snarls, "get the hell away from me. I'm fine."

Castiel's answering glower is so dark that Dean almost reconsiders. Almost.

Time slides past in a thick, molasses stream.

"Dean, please let me help you."

Dean closes his eyes.

"It won't help."

Castiel sighs. "Always this. Sometimes..."

There's a silence the length of forever.

When Castiel speaks again it's like the rustle of wendigo souls in the trees. Quiet and lethal.

"Sometimes I wonder if you'll ever learn."

And then, quieter still.

" I only ever wanted to save you."

(-*-)

Dean has no idea how long it is, five days, a week, a month.

But this time it's not him that breaks, it's Castiel.

Dean wakes up and there's a body on top of him. He struggles, but it's like being held down by an iron statue. Cold and unrelenting. He opens his eyes and glares up at Castiel, who's sitting over him.

"I'm sorry," the angel says, and he looks so abjectly miserable that Dean feels a kick of guilt.

"Go to hell," he spits.

Castiel pries his jaws open and fills Dean's mouth with his blood. Dean struggles, chokes, spits, but some goes down, and it feel so good to have something inside of him, some energy creeping into his muscles, that he drinks greedily, and afterwards, when Castiel has climbed off of him, and Dean has swallowed his last mouthful of bitter blood – he feels disgusted in himself. A cold, soul deep disgust that aches more than any hunger.

"Don't you ever," he says hoarsely, "do that to me again."

Castiel looks at him, face unreadable. "Don't make me," he says, and Dean honestly doesn't know if it's a threat or a plea.

(-*-)

This time, plunged into the dark, timeless place that Castiel's blood sends him, Dean senses a change in his surroundings.

The tall, bright light of Castiel is almost completely dimmed. No longer white, put grey, like a dusty blind has been pulled over it for cover. He knows without thinking that Castiel is hiding from him, shielding himself in case Dean tries to get close to him again.

Dean pointedly surveys the blackness until he's wrenched back to consciousness, feeling colder than ever before.

(-*-)

Dean doesn't go easy. The thing about being stubborn is that, even when you know you're sunk, that doesn't mean you stop swimming.

Three times he lets himself starve, forcing Castiel to hold him down and force blood down his throat. He doesn't even know why he does it, he doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to make Castiel miserable.

Each time Dean is cast into the nowhere between the physical, and the dark place where he's just another little soul in the shadow of an angel's grace. Every time he's put there, all he does is stray as far away from Castiel's shaded light as he can, and shiver in the darkness.

During the times when Dean starves himself, they neither speak, or interact in anyway. The only time Dean talks to Castiel is to spit threats and expletives at him as he holds him down and forces blood into his mouth.

Castiel doesn't speak at all, but his face looks carved in stone, old and worn. And so very very tired.

The guilt Dean feels only makes him more determined to resist Castiel's help.

(-*-)

The seventh time, when Castiel throws Dean against a tree, keeping him there with the pressure of his body, his bleeding wrist between Dean's face and rough bark, it begins to dawn on Dean that he maybe likes this – being held down, made to live.

He likes knowing that someone gives a damn. That Cas cares enough to bring him back from the edge again and again, forcing him to continue on. Not wanting to lose him.

The thought disgusts him. But it also makes sense on an instinctive level, and that frightens him a great deal.

When he slips into the blackness, he tries, for the first time, to get closer to Castiel. He doesn't know why, as some kind of apology perhaps, but his soul is held at bay by the shade over Castiel, and he feels bitterly rejected. All he'd wanted was to offer something - some kind of understanding. Because Dean knows that this is hard for Castiel...and that he's forcing himself to be stable and emotionless, powerful and unyielding – when he hasn't been any of those things for a long time.

Dean thinks about that, and wakes with a new kind of stubbornness in him. An iron desire to survive, and to turn his anger and frustration onto the things that are hunting them, rather than on the one friend he has in purgatory (and any other dimension for that matter).

That's the first day that he touches Castiel's shoulder, and tells him, "I think I need it now."

And he watches Castiel cut his wrist open without a flinch, and offer it up, like it always belonged to him.

When Dean drinks from him, it's as disgusting as it always is. But he wraps his fingers around Cas's, and holds his hand there for as long as he can take it. It's enough to keep him alive for a day anyway.

This time, when he slips sideways into the dark, Castiel's light, still shaded, burns just a little brighter, and Dean can feel warmth flowing from it, filling up the space between them, making him feel comfortable and almost..._welcome. _


	3. Chapter 3

_So, a lot has happened these past weeks – I finished my novel, walked out on my shitty job, graduated and it looks like I'm going to be homeless._

_Still, fanfiction waits for no woman (but please be patient, as I have no internet connection at home right now.)_

There is no way of knowing how long they've been trapped here.

Although Castiel could count every second, he'd given up quickly in the interests of focussing on keeping them alive. For Dean, the loss of time in any concrete sense was maddening, because it meant he had no idea how Sam might be coping. Was he still frantically searching for a solution? Or was Dean now a distant memory to him, a fifty-year old picture. A regret.

Was Sam even still alive?

Dean slept, he walked through the forest, he took cover in dank hollows. Castiel helped him avoid the monsters, dismembering any that came after them. Dean had almost gotten used to feeding on Cas's blood – a thought which was enough to get him worrying about time passing all over again. How long had it taken him to get used to it? A month? A year? Ten?

Either way, he was used to it – to the point that it was the blood he started thinking off whenever his stomach ached with hunger. Partly worried by it, Dean couldn't shake the feeling of comfort that lapping at Castiel's wrist gave him, which was the other thing that was nagging at him.

How long had it been since he'd touched another living thing?

The last time would have been...clapping Sam on the shoulder, right before they'd gone into the belly of the beast. Since then, he hadn't touched anyone, or anything, or been touched himself. The closest he got was holding Castiel's hand to his face while he drank from his wrist.

The only sense of connection he got was in the dark place where he could see Castiel's grace. There he didn't need physical connection, he didn't need his name, or his history, or his voice. He was just a soul, and souls are pure and simple.

Dean in his waking hours? Not so much simple, and not so much pure. His rootless life has been pared down to its essential roots – wandering in the wilderness with only one other guy to talk to (and Cas is not exactly chatty, and even when he does talk, it's usually about the doom that awaits them here in purgatory, or something vague and metaphorical about bees and lions). He owns nothing, has nothing to work towards, and, when he can no longer stand to be awake, he beds down on the cold, dampish ground, and sleeps for so long that he might as well be dead.

For Sam, it has been three months, two weeks and six days (22 hours and 39 minutes, 16 seconds) since Dean disappeared into purgatory.

But for Dean it seems like years.

At the end of his latest 'awake' period, Dean sits down at the base of a tree and stretches out.

"That's it man, no more. I'm calling it."

Castiel, his ever present shadow, just stands in front of him, looking off to the side, as of listening intently.

"I'm done with walking around blind – waiting for Sam to yank us out of here. I'm done."

No response.

"Cas!"

"I can hear you."

Dean glares up at him, feeling weak and sick and so so tired, and pissed. "Great, so long as you're listening. What the hell good does that do? You're acting like you're not stuck here too, like you're not itching to get out of here."

"I want to leave...I'm just not sure..."

"What?" Dean demands.

"Where exactly I would rather be."

Dean huffs. "Try anywhere, anywhere at all." He sighs, leaning hard against the tree, his stomach twists with hunger, and he can already taste the blood at the back of his throat. But there's so much more he needs, and he feels he'll go crazy with no one to talk to, nothing to hold on to.

"Cas, get over here."

Castiel comes closer, stops, offers his wrist from a distance of a foot or so away. Like some shitty modern art interpretation of one of those old religious paintings – _Benediction of an Angel. _

Dean reaches up, takes his hand, and pulls Castiel towards him. Of course, Castiel is an angel, he doesn't move, stays rooted to the spot, like the tree Dean is leaning on.

"Just...come down here, ok?" Dean asks.

Castiel drops gracefully to the ground, the white knees of his uniform sinking into the carpet of old, leathery leaves. Dean looks up at him with something like insolence, but in reality it's indecision, a mutinous crossing of need warring with his better instincts, his pride and his much valued equilibrium – everything he knows about himself, and believes himself to be, is in turmoil.

Castiel is familiar with that feeling.

Dean moves away from the tree, lies down awkwardly, one arm resting on the ground, the other partly folded over his chest. Castiel has observed him in this position a great deal, and it always seems to him worryingly as if Dean has fallen from a great height onto the bed, and (when combined with the deep slumber that came with drink) it seemed that Dean had died there, with his limbs thrown about untidily, carelessly, on the ground, or cheap mattress he was on.

Castiel lies down next to him, as he knows Dean wants him to, though he isn't going to say so.

They both lie there, awake, for a long time. A long, timeless time. Until Castiel realises that they might lie here for all eternity, on the edge of something...ineffable. Something new, and yet rooted in the beginning, the things they've already done for, and to each other, against each other. Everything that's happened and still there's this...distance, this reluctance. He could pour words into the space between them forever, and still the gap would remain. An inch of forest floor that might as well be a mile. A hundred. An ocean, a wall. The distance between a man raking leaves in Indiana, and a thing not quite, but almost, entirely unlike a man fighting in Heaven.

Dean moves, the dark line of ground between them eaten up by the motion, until his arm, still limp at his side, brushes Castiel's, and their shoes scuff, the fabric of their pants legs brushing.

Dean falls asleep soon after, but Castiel continues to torture himself with what was, what might have been and what would be. At least, he does until Dean, heavy with sleep and dead to the dangerous world they are in, rolls onto his belly, arm reaching out and clasping Castiel with irritable insistence, the way a child might hold onto a beloved ragdoll if it felt the toy being pulled away. Dean is a warm weight at his side, his arm a welcome anchor. His face is pressed above Castiel's heart, and still he sleeps on.

Castiel looks up at the starless sky and, with the arm trapped under Dean's body, he squeezes the hunter, ever so slightly.

Dean sleeps sounder than he has since coming for purgatory, all the better for the warm weight of something real in his arms, something other than twilight monsters and damp sticks. His dreams take a strange shape, and with Castiel at his side, he dreams of years ago, back when he was still young and cocky and unafraid.

He wakes up hungry, damp eyed, and finds Castiel's wrist already against his mouth. He starts to drink, and he doesn't even care that Castiel is on top of him, a light weight, as if his bones are hollow. He doesn't even react to the quick dry kiss that Castiel places against the side of his face. Dean stops drinking long enough to press his face against Castiel's damp and tattered sleeve. He is so tired, so very tired, and all he wants is to go back to ten minutes, a lifetime ago – when he didn't need anything that wasn't his dad, or Sam, a car, some music, and the impression of a forgotten woman on the back seat.

When things were simple, instead of what they are now, which is really fucking complicated.

Because now he needs Castiel, and it's not like it was at the beginning, he doesn't need him as a weapon, or a source of information, it's not even that he needs his blood. He just needs _him. _

They're stuck staring at each other, and Dean finds himself looking at the person in front of him – not the angel, not the power and the stolen vessel – but the person Castiel has become, the thing that feels and acts on its own belief. The person Dean helped to make.

And then Castiel is hauled off into the dark by a snarling, spitting _thing. _

Dean snatches for Cas's clothes, his hands, but Castiel is dragged with a yell off into the trees. Dean grapples to his feet, already feeling woozy from the blood. Shit, he can't pass out now. Not when...

Castiel shouts, and this time it's less in shock and more in pain. The thing growls and Dean can hear the sounds of a fight, the wet slap of blood splashing on leathery leaves, of hide tearing.

He really hopes that Castiel is winning.

Dean stumbles through the trees and looks all around for a flash of Cas's white scrubs. The sounds of violence seem to come from everywhere, echoing and bouncing from dead tree to dead tree.

Dean's vision whites out, scaring the shit out of him. The forest disappears into the darkness of his inner vision, and Castiel's grace, though further off that he usually sees it, glows brightly, pulsing and flickering.

The dark trees return with a jolt, and Dean runs in the direction of Castiel's grace.

When he reaches him, Dean falls headlong over Castiel's prone body. Scrabbling through the leaves, Dean finds Castiel's body, skin rent all over and bleeding fiercely. The shadowy body of his attacker lies against a tree a few meters away, growling and whimpering, but apparently unable to get up. Dean pushes Castiel's clothes out of the way, inspecting the damage.

"Shit," he says under his breath.

Castiel is bleeding hard and fast, and Dean can see his ribs through the deep gashes. Castiel chokes on a mouthful of blood and turns his face to the ground.

"Hey," Dean snaps, jerking Cas's head up again, "this is nothing, ok? I've seen you get vaporised, this, is, nothing. You're gonna be fine."

He has no idea who he's trying to convince.

Castiel coughs more blood and tries to say something.

"Too far."

Dean looks at him, and he knows, instantly, what Castiel means. He's too far from heaven. Too far from the host, and means his days of miraculous healing are over.

"Fuck," Dean spits, looking around into the dark.

An endless stream of profanity fills his head. What can he do? What is there? What does he usually do in situations like this? _Get drunk_ springs to mind – make deals...he can't think, but there has to be something...there always is.

Think. He tells himself. Just for once, fucking _think._

Castiel's hand grabs his where it's resting on the dirt, blood bubbles from his mouth and he manages one word.

"Don't."

Trouble is, Dean has never been one for doing what he's told, especially when he's trying to save that person's life.

Especially when a really really bad idea presents itself.

He grabs Castiel's weakly resisting hand and drags it to his belly, pushing it firstly against his shirt, then under it, onto his skin. Nothing happens.

"C'mon, you idiot," he shakes Castiel's shoulder, and his hand comes away bloody. "Cas!"

Castiel shakes his head as much as he can.

Dean grits his teeth, leans forwards and mutters, "fine, hard way it is – don't say I never returned the tough love."

And with that he sucks a mouthful of bitter blood from a wound in Castiel's neck, and falls headlong into the darkness.

If Castiel won't take from his soul – Dean will force it into his hands.

Dean doesn't stop to think, just pushes his soul forwards, burning desperately bright, he forces it through the fading barrier between him and Castiel's grace, there's almost no resistance, Castiel's too weak to fight, still, Dean can sense his fear, and Castiel's disgust at himself. Dean just pushes through, finds the darkness between the light that makes Castiel up, and kinda...detonates there. His soul splits apart, and he wakes up, shocked out of the darkness.

Castiel's hand is still clasped limply in his, and still it has not entered his chest, as he'd seen Castiel do to Sam.

But Dean can taste blood in his mouth, Castiel's blood, and something else, like white hot copper. His mouth is pressed to Castiel's, and his soul shivers between their lips, a star half eclipsed. The white, scorching energy is terrifying, and Dean forces himself not to pull away, but it's a close thing. Then it's gone, splitting in half without a fight, half of it subsiding back inside of him, the rest disappearing down Castiel's throat.

Dean slumps forwards, grasped in Castiel's suddenly strengthened arms, the wounds under his cheek already healing.


	4. Chapter 4

Dean wakes up and looks up at where Castiel's face is hovering over his.

He doesn't think he's ever seen Cas look so pissed at him. His eyes are practically black, and he looks ancient and utterly terrifying. If Dean wasn't on the verge of passing out again he'd probably be freaked out.

"That, was a fucking stupid thing to do." Castiel grits out, and, Dean has never heard him swear before.

Come to think of it, he'd never seen Castiel's eyes look like this before either. They're no black he realises, they're green. And entirely too familiar.

"What were you thinking?" Castiel demands.

"That you were dying – you're welcome, by the way," Dean spits.

If anything, Castiel actually looks more angry.

"You are incredibly lucky, I have no idea why either of us is still alive. What you did was stupid, impossible, and..." his eyes kind of lighten, and then they're blue again, and Castiel blinks, his face losing its expression of anger. "...I don't deserve this."

He leans back, puzzled, and Dean sits up cautiously.

"Feeling ok?"

"No." Castiel says, "I feel...I would like very much to hit you. That's not really unusual, but...there are things that...aren't me." he looks at Dean, "what have you done?"

"Like I know? I was just trying to get you to touch my soul – which, by the way, if you had done I wouldn't have had to puke it up. How the hell did that happen anyway? I though souls would be more...harder to get out anyway."

"They are." Castiel says, looking at nothing in particular, and certainly not at Dean. "though, nothing about the situation is typical."

Dean sighs. "This is going to be more of that 'profound bond' stuff, isn't it?"

"A little." Castiel shrugs as if it's not a big deal, and Dean feels a stab of unease, because that's _his _shrug. The one he uses on Sam when he doesn't want to get into it. Whatever it is at that point. "It might have more to do with the amount of my grace that you've ingested, and the fact that..."

"That?"

"That I've held your soul before."

Dean really wishes that for once he could be a textbook example. That he could be a freaking regular human being, that his soul could not have been to hell, and could act like other souls and not go slutting around and throwing itself into the mouths of angels. Angel. Singular.

"So...you've got half my soul."

"Yes."

"...Can I have it back?"

"What do you think I've been trying to do?" Castiel sighs. "I've spent the last...amount of time, trying to disengage from it and put it back, but..." he looks sheepish.

"What?"

"It won't leave...it doesn't want to."

"What do you mean it doesn't want to? It's my soul, it's got to do what I want and I want it back."

"Clearly...you don't."

Dean doesn't know what to say to that. Sure, he'd really wanted Cas to have his soul, but that was when he'd thought Castiel was dying. Now he isn't, he's just sitting there, and Dean doesn't like knowing that part of him is inside the angel that's currently looking at him like he might be about to have a nervous breakdown.

He's also hungry.

The two feelings war for a moment, and then Dean says. "How much grace do I have in me anyway."

"Not just grace...grace is the energy I have, but, there's something of me there too." Castiel says, apologetically. "my grace has been diminishing, I didn't have enough for you, and for myself."

"So, I've been eating you?" Dean really does not like the way that sounds. Because it sounds less like Ruby and Sam's little arrangement, hell, less like a vampire even, and more like a ghoul or a werewolf. Like he's ripping into Cas's angel-flesh.

"It hasn't hurt me." Castiel assures him quietly, "It's just..." he steers away from the words he was going to use, 'intimate' being one of them. "it just takes from the centre of me."

Dean has a worrying thought.

"When you say you were trying to put my soul back...please tell me you weren't kissing me, while I was asleep. Because...that shit is just, not cool, in any dimension."

Castiel doesn't say anything.

"Cas!"

"I could lie, if that would improve the situation?"

Dean groans, flopping back onto the ground. "Great, that's just..." he sits up, one hand grabbing the side of Castiel's neck, pulling him down, kissing him with no finesse. Brutal and blunt, like a knuckle scraping punch.

And even though Cas's lips look soft, they disappear almost to nothing, underneath there's nothing but hardness – the angel under the vessel, and all Dean's left with is the sharp coolness of teeth, clean breath, prickling almost-stubble and the taste of saliva.

Dean pulls away, the tiny wet sound of their mouths parting is amplified 'till it's like the ripping of some creature's flesh.

Dean swallows, and his throat feels swollen, his skin feels hot and his body almost hurts.

"Didn't work." He says, lips paper dry under the spit Cas's left there.

"What were you trying to do?" Castiel asks, his voice just as quiet as Deans had been.

"Get my soul back." Dean's hand, without permission, still had hold of Cas's neck, only now he's not so much pulling as, holding.

Castiel looks pained, and for the first time, Dean remembers what souls mean, in the context of Cas, and all the shit that happened to him. His drug of choice, his desperate grasp at power.

"I'm sorry I've taken it from you." Castiel says, "if I could put it back, I would."

"Yeah?" Dean asks, not feeling as good as he ought to after hearing that.

Castiel's nods, almost imperceptibly.

Dean closes the gap between them, kisses him again, hard, a swipe of tongue and a nip of teeth, and Castiel doesn't so much soften as let go of his steel-hard edges. He's changed since he scraped the crazy out of Sam's head, he's not a marble statue, he's not all simple and trusting and loyal – he's a mess, he's lies and secrets and hiding behind fake tranquillity and pretence at the simplicity of life.

And Dean doesn't want to let him go – because he made him, or they made each other. If rock striking rock can be said to make something of its cracked twin. They've grated on each other, rubbed off on each other till they were raw and angry, bleeding and hurt.

But fuck if Dean wants to stop.

It doesn't get his soul back. It doesn't make it hurt less that his life has been falling apart since he was four. Hell, it doesn't improve either of their lives one iota, but it feels good. More than that, it fills a need he's never been able to meet, never really understood. And it's not the need for another brother, for a father, for a lover or a soul mate or a trustworthy friend – it's everything. He is everything. Everything Dean wants to be, everything he wants, and doesn't know how to have.

Time in purgatory is diabolical, it passes but it leaves no trace.

It feels like they've been kissing for days, touching for weeks, and, when the sky over them remains still and starless, and they've shed their clothes after an eternity of small, infinitesimal touches, it feels as though they've been joined for years, and goes on until Dean can't remember ever being with anyone else. Can't remember what it was like not to be able to press his fingers into Castiel's shoulder blades and pull him closer. Can't remember how he felt before he could pour everything he regretted, everything he'd loved, into Castiel, and feel him hold him tighter.

For most denizens of purgatory, their punishment was an eternity of being hunted.

Dean's eternity of hunting had ended when he'd given his soul to save Castiel's life. Not given it up, or given it away – but given it. Trusting that it would stay safe and unabused.

Figures that he'd fall in love in the scariest freaking place in the universe, that giving his soul away, being surrounded by pure blooded rugaroos and wendigos would pale in comparison with letting Cas in. (In every sense of the word).

It was terrifying. And like most terrifying things, it became remarkably easy once he'd started.

Dean had no way of keeping time, Castiel moved them from place to place in the blink of an eye, and Dean rarely noticed the changes in the patterns of the dark trees that surrounded them. All he knew, all he wanted to know, was Castiel, and the sharp shifting in his chest, pain giving way to relief and back again. Fear and joy and loss and betrayal and love. Love as horrible and painful and real as the wounds that Castiel had suffered.

He does however notice when the trees disappear, when he feels tattered carpet under his back, and the endless sky over him becomes faded stucco with a rusted, bulbless chandelier in it.

He notices when candlelight and hurricane lamps make his eyes hurt, used as he is to the half-light of purgatory.

When Sam drops a shower of loose papers to the floor and says his name, as if he hasn't said it in a very long time.

He notices that he's alone.


	5. Chapter 5

Dean rolls onto his knees, hunched protectively, looking up at Sam, where he's silhouetted against the boarded over windows.

The rooms is strange to him, smelling of coffee, and the alien odour of human occupation. There's a radio in another room playing music, and it takes him a minute to work out what music even is.

"Dean?" Sam says, stepping forwards and then hanging back, unsure.

Dean looks around, but there's no sign of Cas. Panic stabs him in the chest. For what felt like forever, he'd had Cas with him, inside of him, around him. Now Castiel is gone, and Dean can't hold back a shiver. He's all alone.

When Sam's hands grab his shoulders, he jumps, and looks up into his brother's eyes.

"Dean, are you OK?"

"Where's Cas?"

Sam frowns, and Dean realises that he hasn't been able to picture his brother's face for a long while. That it's been even longer since his memory of it was exact.

"The spell, I had to have something to bring you here, something of yours." Sam gestures to the small pile of clothing, cassette tapes and I.D's in the middle of a complex sigil. "That's what brought you here, rather than somewhere else...I didn't have anything of Cas's to make it work."

"Get him here," Dean says shakily.

Sam looks really worried. "I can't, Dean, most of the components for the spell were almost one of a kind to begin with...I can't even be sure if I pulled Castiel out, but if I did, he'll find us."

Castiel had to have left purgatory, Dean had had his hands on him, his body on his own, there was no way he'd let go. Spell or no spell.

But what if he hadn't?

Another roll of cold needles covers his skin. He realises only then that he's naked.

Sam drops a coarse blanket over him, and Dean closes his eyes against the weird, bright light of the hurricane lamps, and focuses on trying to breathe.

It's only then, without the assault of strange sights and the feeling of unrelenting coldness, that he can sense Castiel.

He still can't see him, or hear him, but there's a feeling in his chest, that points, almost pulling him towards the far side of the room, a corner with nothing in it but curled up leaves and several decades worth of dust.

But Castiel is there, Dean can feel it.

"Cas?" he says, and Sam follows his gaze to the empty corner, worry lines etched anew on his face.

And with that, the feeling of Castiel, just disappears.

Dean feels like he's been punched in the chest. Through the chest. Like some great hand has made a hole in him and pulled something out. Castiel is gone, and it feels like the world is ending, only, inside of him.

His soul, he realises, through the bruised and bloody, pulped up sensation. The half of his soul that he still has, whimpering and lost, useless as a blob of jello.

"Dean?" Sam's hands are on his shoulders again. "What's wrong?"

Dean shakes his head. The pain is bad, but it's not physical, it's deeper. He stands up and wraps the blanket firmly around himself.

"Nothing."

Sam looks at him, and his whole face is etched with doubt, but he doesn't say anything other than "I've got some of your clothes in the other room, food too. You hungry?"

Dean tries to keep his gaze from returning to the corner of the room.

"Starving."

(-*-)

On the third day of watching Dean wince his way through the daylight hours, shudder his way through the night, and suck the marrow out of chicken bones, Sam sits his down in the front room of the house they're squatting in.

"We need to talk."

Dean is balled up on the sagging cloth couch, bare feet tucked up under him, the ragged cuffs of his jeans trailing towards the dirty floor.

"Why?"

"Why? You're freaking me out, that's why." Sam tells him, "You're not sleeping, and, OK, so I remember that being your thing, but you're dragging yourself around like a wounded animal, and...I think maybe it's time to ask about purgatory."

Dean looks up at him. "I'm not acting like a wounded animal."

"Coulda fooled me," Sam gestures at his hunched posture. "And you're really starting to freak me out with the not talking and the blank stare and the ripping flesh off of the bones of whatever I bring you to eat, you're acting like a...I don't know, like a..."

_Monster_, hangs in the air between them.

"That was one time, and how else do you eat chicken?"

"Like a person, rather than a starving dog."

"Great. So I'm a wounded dog now? Thanks Sam."

"Well, at least now you sound like my brother."

Dean glares at him. "I am your brother."

"Yeah, except for that whole five year period when you vanished off the face of the earth."

The stillness of the abandoned house becomes almost eerily total. Dean sits up straighter. "Five years?"

"I didn't mean to say that. I was going to tell you...later."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. You deserve to know, but...I thought I could give you a week before I started spilling home truths."

"You mean you wanted to get the gross, gritty details first." Dean says, with more venom than he'd intended. "Just like when I came back from hell, you couldn't wait to start the 'talking cure'."

"You gonna lie to me again? Tell me you don't remember a thing?" Sam challenges, his face setting.

Dean laughs, without humour. "Wow, you really are the older brother now, aren't you?"

Sam looks like he's going to say something, then thinks better of it, swallows his words and takes a breath. Dean looks at the floor, nursing the wound inside himself. It's been getting worse as the days have gone by, except for a few seconds in the morning, fractured moments when the pain is gone, and Dean can almost breathe again, before the sound of wings steals the air from him, and leaves him in pain again.

He's pretty sure Castiel has been coming to see him. What's getting to him is the fact that he won't stick around.

"I remember," Dean says, "there's just nothing worth talking about. Nothing I can talk about."

"Was it that bad?" The little, caring, twist appears in Sam's eyebrows

Dean mulls this over for a while. "...it wasn't the usual. Usual for me, anyway. But it wasn't bad, no."

Sam huffed, "Only you could get stuck in a dimension of pure monsters and say it wasn't bad-"

"Well, that was bad. Scary. But..." he looks down at his hands, has a vivid memory of Alistair pushing his fingers in between the tendons, making a fist and pulling until his hand came away, the cartilage popping like a chicken leg...

"...nothing hurt me. That's all." Dean mutters, clenching his fists and looking up.

"Because Cas was there?" Sam asks, "he looked after you?"

"We looked out for each other," Dean shrugs, "Same as me and you."

Not the same. Nowhere near, but he can't say it, can't even think the right words. Words like 'love' and 'devotion'. The worst part is, Sam might even understand the blood thing, maybe even the souls...but there's no way he could imagine the rest, the parts that weren't bloody and painful – the softness.

Sam must be reading his mind, because he says, "I didn't think you and Cas were...well, he seemed pretty adamantly not...brotherly."

"When you wake up in a forest full of monsters, let's see how long you hold a grudge. Or stick to pacifism come to that."

"Are you worried about him?"

"Yeah." Just not in the way you mean.

Sam eventually goes out to get dinner, and Dean wastes no time in going to the boarded window, watching his brother pull away in the car, and then turning back to the empty room and muttering, "Let's see you now you son of a-"

Castiel fades into existence in the same corner Dean had sensed him in before.

"Where the hell have you been?" Dean hisses, "I've been going out of my mind here."

Castiel doesn't meet his eye, looks at the floor, the walls, anywhere else. "I thought you might want me to-"

"Disappear?"

"Remain at a distance."

"Great, so you've been off playing hard to get." It's really not funny, but he's kind of light headed from the sudden lack of soul-deep pain. "Cas, in what dimension is it ok to just, vanish, after..." he wets his lips.

Castiel blinks tactfully. "I think, if you cannot say it to four walls, yourself and me...distance is what you need."

"Fuck that." Dean spits, "this is not about...look, do you know how it feels, when you're not here?"

"...yes." Castiel admits, eyes once again finding the ground.

"They why do that to me, to you?" Dean takes an angry step forwards, lowering his voice. "Why sneak around, popping in when I'm sleeping, just so you can go away again and leave me with a freaking...hole in my chest?"

Castiel lets out a long breath. "You haven't mentioned that pain to Sam."

Dean gives him a sharp look, "I thought your spying days were over."

"They are," Castiel says, with more feeling than either of them expected, his voice scraping the walls like blunt steel. "I only came because..."

"Because Sam was gonna be out of the way?"

"Because I wanted to see you." Castiel looks incredibly uncomfortable, "just...see you."

"You saw a lot of me before..."

"I know." Castiel's face pretty much showcases his four most practiced emotions – confused, angry, beseeching and anxious. "I remember."

And it's those four words that make Dean suddenly deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

"Dean..."

"I know, ok? I haven't forgotten." Dean swallows, "because, apparently, I spent the best part of five years being fu..." He cuts himself off, "being..."

Castiel watches him struggle, helpless to voice what Dean himself cannot find a way to say.

Dean holds his gaze, and for a moment they just look at each other, trying to understand what the other is thinking, whether they still have a place in each other's minds. Dean's soul is finally, finally still and resting, and he knows that the same relief is coursing through Castiel's veins. And it' so easy to go from this well remembered dance of personal space invasion, and long looks, slipping back into what they'd had just days ago. That eternity of uncomplicated _now. _

Castiel is just inches away, looking up at him, and somehow they both step across the space at the same time. Until there is no space, and Dean can't see the room around them because his vision is filled with Castiel, his senses blanking out everything else. Then he closes his eyes.

It's different, kissing him while time ticks past, second by second. Where each breath they have to pull away to take is a mark on a clock, each new touch of hesitant, determined lips and hands that can't seem to stop shaking, is an event in a time stream. Marked down. Real.

It's terrifying. And terror gets smart men killed.

But it's also compulsive.

Far from simply ending the pain, being here, with Castiel, touching him, actually makes Dean feel...good. The ache in his chest replaced with a pleasant feeling, unlike anything else. Castiel's lips move against his, breaking off to kiss his jaw, brush against his chin, mouth his neck. Things Dean remembers from before, back when his world was taken up with timeless, endless nearness. When he'd breathed Castiel, fed on him, felt him all over.

It feels so natural, because he's felt it thousands of times before, and yet now, each touch is like a fiery brand, because it exists. It's in the world. A world that includes Sam and mouldering drywall and the hundred-thousand tiny memories and reminders that he's not just himself – he's who he is. What he is.

And that is Dean Winchester, a man who most certainly does not stand in darkened rooms, kissing angels.

A man who'd baulk at the suggestion that he would.

So he keeps his eyes closed, wilfully pushing that idea of himself away, and holding onto the feeling of Cas's hands under his shirt, touching his skin and making him feel, rather than think.

Their kisses become desperate, hungry, no less fraught and no less shocking to Dean's system. Without meaning to, and yet being painfully aware of every touch, they're running their hands over each other, both reminded that before, outside of time, they hadn't worn clothes for the longest stretch of moments.

The sound of car tires slashing across gravel bring them both up short, their hands still on each other, mouths suddenly parting, breathing harshly. Castiel looks on the verge of either smiting something or crumpling away to nothing. Dean feels like he's been running for hours, though to or from what he has no idea. And whatever it is, it's out of reach. Or gaining on him, heat thumping second by second.

He looks up to find that Castiel's eyes are once again looking anywhere but him.

"You're leaving?"

"I don't want to." Castiel stresses, with his usual level of portentous determination.

"So why-"

"Because you want me to."

Dean swallows. Not able to separate the parts of him that want Castiel to stay, from the rest. The parts that will die if Sam catches him, here, like this. "I do, want you to."

Castiel just looks at him.

"I don't know why I...I don't understand any of this," Dean mutters, "what..."

"I don't know what's happening to us." Castiel says, neatly filling in the rest of Dean's sentence. "Maybe...something bad, begun in purgatory...maybe I should never have given you-"

"Well, I don't regret saving your life. So if you try to take back what you did for me, I swear, I'll..." the empty threat hangs in the air.

"I'm not sorry." Castiel murmurs. "But, perhaps it is a factor."

The door scrapes open, Sam's footsteps in the other room.

"Say you're coming back. Tonight." Dean says, wincing at how needy he sounds, finding that part of him doesn't care.

Castiel looks like he dearly wants to say no. And he looks more torn than Dean has ever seen him.

"Cas?"

"Yes." Castiel says, and disappears abruptly, as if scared he'll change his mind.

Sam shoves open the door a second later, a brown paper bag in his hand. "Hope you like it lukewarm and...hey, what's wrong?"

"What?" Dean says, trying to remember how he arranges his face when there's nothing for it to communicate.

"You look, kinda...lost." Sam says, look uncertain as to his own word. "Anything wrong?"

"No." Dean says, "and I know exactly where I am."

_In the middle of a whole mess of fucked up feeling, with angel spit on my neck._

And that joins the legions of things he doesn't say.


	6. Chapter 6

_So, I've got lots of messages about some of my stories, including the Santorum, porn one, disappearing from the site. No, this was not intentional. They've been taken down without my knowledge or consent, and I only have the two most recent chapters still on my pc. I'll be re-uploading them, but on livejournal. I'm very sorry I couldn't respond to all the messages individually. If you'd like a link to my lj, check twitter - JollySnidge, where you can get all the updates about my fics etc._

Sam has a copy of the paper, and he spreads it out over the table while they eat, pointing out an article which might be the start of a job. Course, it could also be termites, but there was no harm in checking it out. He tells Dean that there are still Leviathans around, but they're not really organised, and thanks to the concerted efforts of small groups of angels, there are fewer by the day.

"The angels are actually fighting them?"

"Gives them something to do I guess," Sam shrugs, "they haven't really had a mission statement for a while, but this is...well, Leviathans can kill them, so it makes sense they'd want them gone."

Dean nods, but he doesn't really want to think about it.

"I'm sorry about Cas," Sam says, "I mean, I could try getting some stuff together, trying a spell...but I don't really know what I'm doing with all this purgatory stuff. The spell I used to get you was old, like, pre-historic."

"Where'd you get it?"

Sam looked like he was going to evade the question, then sighed and said, "Crowley."

"And what'd that cost you?"

"Nothing."

"Because we're such good friends?"

"Because when Nurse Meg was sitting up nights with Cas, she got him to tell her where he hid Crowley's bones. The real ones."

Dean was impressed despite himself, it seemed like Sam had kept it together, planned a hell of an escape route for him, and taken care of himself to boot.

Sam caught his look. "A lot changed the last few years...I'm not like I was."

"I know."

"And you aren't either."

Dean stayed silent.

"Any time you want to tell me...you can."

"You know I would if..."

"If?"

Dean managed a half smile, "If I knew a damn thing about what was going on with me."

Sam huffed a laugh. "Yeah, because you're so deep."

"I have depths."

Sam raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, under all that alpha male crap, you're a real philosopher."

Dean rolled his eyes.

Sam's face turned pensive as he realised that he'd missed this, having his brother around to make fun of. It had been a lonely five years. Ok, so he'd kept busy, done his job, worked on the spell. But after all the work was done, he was sleeping in a one-bed hotel room with no one to wake him up with crappy music, or a kick up the ass. He'd felt the silence weighing on him.

Dean yawned abruptly and half shocked himself.

"Better be getting to bed," Sam said, "gotta be on the road early."

"Yes Dad." Dean said, rolling his eyes.

The bedrooms upstairs were not in the best condition, but they had usable mattresses, which made Dean happy. After spending half a decade sleeping on the floor of a dark forest, he was newly appreciative of life's little comforts. The re-discovery of indoor plumbing and hot water had almost brought tears to his eyes. Not that he'd admit it.

The room itself is all peeling paper and bare boards, but it's not so bad. He strips off his clothes and piles them on his bag to keep them away from the dust, then climbed onto the mattress, slipping between the two sheets that make up his bed.

He dozes, not entirely asleep, not all the way awake either – the perfect state in which to be if darkness brings out all the things that want you dead.

Still, it takes him a moment to work out exactly why he's suddenly wide awake, and when he narrows it down to the slight depression in the mattress behind him, he doesn't respond by leaping for his gun.

"Hey Cas."

Castiel sighs, sitting on the old mattress, looking at the wall. Dean rolls onto his back so he can look at him. "You came back then."

"I said I would."

"Yeah."

Castiel looks ancient, shoulders slumped and face lowered towards the floor. "I've been thinking..."

"For the last three hours."

"...about managing this situation."

Dean sits up and glares at him. "It's not a situation – it's not a freaking nuclear crisis. It's just...what happened, and what we're going to do about it."

"What are we going to do?"

"You've been thinking for three hours and that's all you're bringing to the table?"

Castiel sighed. "I've come up with a few options."

"Let's hear it then," Dean said, then paused, frowning, "hey...is that mine?"

Castiel's pale fingers twisted in the hem of his black shirt. "Yes. When I woke up, my clothes were still in purgatory. I appropriated these."

"Stuck around long enough to cover your ass before running off then."

Castiel turns to him with a glaring look of irritation on his face, which changes, almost instantly, to one of fierce longing. Dean realises with a jolt that he's naked, and that, while his sheets are covering a lot of him, there's still enough left on show to make him uncomfortable. At least, five years ago, he would have been uncomfortable. Now he just watches.

Castiel finally looks away, like he's tearing his eyes away from the last thing he'll ever see.

"There is a...complex system in place," he starts, "between your soul, and my grace...my self. Leaving purgatory, resuming a normal existence, has put it into flux."

"So what you mean is, now I'm not chowing down on...blood and grace and...you. Things are getting all messed up?"

"Yes." Castiel said, "but it's more than just the way we've been feeling, when we're not in the same place. Without my grace, half a soul is not enough to sustain you."

"Sam did ok with no soul." Dean said, then remembers exactly what Sam had done, "ok, so he wasn't fine, but he was alive."

Castiel nods, and if Dean wasn't paying attention he could have been lulled into believing that Castiel was being all angelic and stoic. But the angel's hands are fiddling with the hem of his borrowed shirt, and Dean can tell that he's nervous.

"There's a massive 'but' coming down the line, isn't there?"

"But," Castiel begins, "your soul isn't just missing, contained somewhere. It's been split...inexpertly and...clumsily."

"Thanks Cas."

"What I mean is, it's wounded, and it's only the infusion of grace that has kept it stable, comfortable. Without that..."

"I have a bleeding hunk of soul in me?"

Castiel nodded, but the look on his face said that worse was coming, he just didn't want to voice it.

Dean thought for a moment, trying to work out what Castiel was driving at. If his soul was going to start bleeding, that wasn't good, clearly. The only time he'd known souls could bleed was...

"Hell." Dean says quietly, "It's gonna be like hell."

"It will most probably feel like it." Castiel says softly.

"And what about you, or are you fine?" Dean doesn't mean it to sound as rough as it does, but he's got fear sitting in his throat, sending spidery shocks through his chest. Fear he'd thought was gone, and which he should have known would never leave.

"The parts of me that I've given you, are irreplaceable." Castiel tells him gravely. "Being near them will help me to maintain my equilibrium."

"In English"?

"It will help me avoid...a nuclear disaster."

"Shit." Dean balls his fists up on his knees. "You're going to what? Explode?"

"I don't really know, only that it would be best for me, and possibly the continental US, if I avoided it."

"And how do we do that?"

"We have, as I say, a number of options."

"Which are?"

Castiel sighs again, and Dean is really getting sick of hearing that little, despairing sound. He reaches out, and, without meaning to, puts his hand on Cas's arm. The effect is like linking copper with lightning, and a jolt goes up has arm, right through him. Memories, like a rockslide find their way into his brain. He remembers this, wanting this, what it felt like to have it.

He removes his hand quickly.

"There are three ways we could go about this." Castiel says, his voice dry as dust. "Firstly, we could find someone capable of putting my energy back inside of me, and your soul back together."

"And who can do that?"

"God." There's a hint of bitter irony in Cas's voice.

"Option number two?"

"I could cauterise your soul, prevent it from feeling the wound anymore."

"But..." Dean said, anticipating the damage that would cause.

"You wouldn't feel anything else either. And the process would be agonising, almost certainly lethal to a human."

"And number three?"

Castiel stays silent until Dean says it for him. "We go on like before?"

Castiel nods.

Dean looks down at his knees, not even sure he can look at Castiel right now.

"I don't know if I can." He says after a while.

"I'd thought about that." Castiel tells him.

"And?"

"What?"

"Well, you thought about it."

"That's all I did." Castiel shrugs. "Thought about it."

"But you have a preference, right?" Dean pushes, "about me drinking your blood, and..." he forces it out, "and everything else that goes with that."

When he looks up, Castiel's eyes are on him, hurt and disbelieving.

"Dean, the things that we did, in purgatory. They were not as a result of this...arrangement." Again he consults his hands, as if the answers to this latest quandary might be written into the lines of Jimmy's skin. "I know that you'd like to believe that they were..."

"No, no I really wouldn't." Dean says, "I saw what happened with Sam and Ruby, ok? And I never want to be like that, to have something change the way I am, and what I think, 'till I don't even know myself. And that's not what you and I did."

"No." Castiel agrees.

"But I still don't know...how to process what that was. Or even know what it was to begin with. Let alone what that makes me." Dean says. "I don't even know what you're thinking about it."

Castiel's silence was almost damning. Then, he reached over, and put his hand on Dean's, so that both of them could feel the jolt of contact again.

"I regret many things associated with purgatory... this, is not one of them."

Dean lets his fingers curl with Castiel's, relieved, despite himself, that Castiel had not done something out of duty that he now regretted. His relief is quickly swallowed by a gaping abyss of uncertainty. His whole body, the sore place inside of him that might be his soul, ache with the need to keep Castiel here, with him, tonight. But how can he ask that? How can he open his mouth, and get the words out – stay with me, please?

They sit there, and Dean can hear his own breathing, on and on in the silence, their hands still touching, Castiel's eyes torn up with the same crisis that Dean himself is trapped in.

Finally, Castiel says, "You should sleep."

Dean nods.

"I'll come back tomorrow, when Sam is elsewhere, to..."

Dean nods again, knowing that he'll have to drink Cas's blood to keep them both alive and sane.

"Take care of yourself." Dean says, and Castiel offers him a tight, almost-smile, before he disappears.

Dean lies down, and for what feels like an age, he can't sleep, can't even keep his eyes closed.

Eventually though, his human nature takes over, pulling him under, for his own good.

Castiel returns only minutes after Dean has fallen asleep, invisible, intangible, but present all the same. Watching as the darkness of the room becomes tinged, then lanced with light, as time rolls forwards, relentlessly.


	7. Chapter 7

_Apparently, lj really hates my cuts, sorry guys, minor malfunction. When I put Santorum back up there, I'll be sure to check that it's actually under a cut :P Meanwhile, my homeless saga continues, and I may soon have a permanent internet connection, as, if I don't hear about a job in the next two days, I'll be moving back home._

_Good news though, I'm almost halfway through my new novel, a m/m romance that will be joining Me and Mine and Ink on Amazon in September. (Hopefully)._

_Now, for some story-_

Dean follows Sam from the victims house, to the police station, and off to the morgue. He remembers this, the way they worked, though now it's different. Now Sam plays the senior officer, Dean is his subordinate. Sam has five more years of hunting under his belt.

And Dean has his own experiences.

While Sam's looking at the torn up body, inspecting the claw marks, gouges and teeth marks, Dean stands rooted by its side, waiting for Sam's opinion. When none is forthcoming, and twenty minutes have gone by, he realises that he's going to have to say something.

"It was a vampire."

Sam looks up. "What?"

"A vampire. The thing that did this, that's what it was."

Sam considers the body, then looks at Dean's certain, carefully blank face. "Mind telling me how you know?"

Dean shrugs. "I just do. I've seen a lot of what vamps can do when they're pissed, and this...looks like a vampire attack."

Sam looks for a moment like he wants to argue. But then he nods, his mouth a cautious flat line. "Ok. Let's look for some leads on where they're hiding."

They spend the day looking around the derelict ship yard, and at several abandoned houses. Nothing suggests they've been home to vampires recently. When it comes time to explore the woods, Sam looks at Dean like he's expecting him to refuse to go in, but Dean doesn't say a word.

"Are you sure you want to keep looking?" Sam asks, as they go further into the forest.

"Trees don't scare me." Dean points out wryly.

Sam keeps quiet after that.

It is indeed a vampire, one, singular, half starved vampire, living in fear of the leviathans and trying to cover its tracks by savaging its victims rather than biting them. It takes them less than an hour to kill it and hide the remains.

It should be just like old times, but it doesn't feel that way. Dean's not exactly distracted, but his mind isn't on Sam, because he knows that his older 'little' brother can handle himself. His mind keeps drifting to Cas instead, as the ache inside of him grows stronger, 'till it's more like a pull.

When Sam suggests getting some lunch, Dean cracks, and tells him he'd rather go back to the house and get some rest.

Sam raises his eyebrows, never having known Dean to turn down food, or act so subdued after such a successful hunt.

"You feeling ok?"

"Sure. Why?"

"I just thought..." Sam shrugged, "nothing, just, are you still worried? About Cas?"

Dean's shrug was measured, tense. "He can take care of himself. But, yeah, I'd like to know where he is, how he's getting on, you know?"

"I'll try and find something." Sam promises. "When I've got something to offer..."

"I know. You'll tell me. Don't kill yourself worrying about it – he'll be fine."

Sam drops Dean at the start of the street they're staying on, and watches him walk away. The weird thing is, as soon as Dean thinks he's out of sight, he starts to walk faster, and then to jog. Hurrying back to the house.

(-*-)

Castiel is already there when he arrives, sitting like a stiffly stuffed toy on the end of the torn couch.

Dean stops still in the doorway, surprised, swallowing his nerves.

"Were you watching us?"

"I was listening."

"Taking that whole 'not spying' thing one day at a time, huh?"

Castiel looks down at his hands. "I was waiting for the right moment."

Dean looks down at the floor, lets the irritation seep out of him. The ache in his chest has dimmed a little, but not disappeared. They need to do this, and they've got maybe half an hour before Sam's done munching his greens. Less if he decides to get it to go and come check up on him.

Dean clears his throat. "So, where do you want to do this?"

It's a dumb, inane question, and it makes him uncomfortable. Before, in the forest, one place was as good as another, it was all dark, menacing and uncomfortable. Here there are many ways, many places they could do this, and each has a different level of involvement, of intimacy.

Castiel stands up, a knife appearing in his hand. He stops about a foot in front of Dean, cuts his wrist without a wince, and holds it up, the knife vanishing as if it had never been.

At arm's length, Dean feels the coldness radiating from Castiel, the determination of him as he remains blank and silent. He takes Castiel's hand between his own, leans over it, and drinks.

The relief isn't instant, it's slow, gratifying, like feeling the heat from a fire seep into his frozen flesh. Bit by bit it creeps through him, until he shudders with it, feeling himself relax and warm from the infusion of Castiel's grace. The blood in his mouth is thick and coppery, and whilst it isn't the best thing he's ever tasted, it's not the worst. It's almost comforting, in the way that the reek of petrol, the smell of old beer, could be comforting, reminding him of Bobby, of the impala, in the days when he ridden in the passenger seat, next to his dad.

At length, he slows his drinking, takes shorter pulls, and then lets the blood just flow into his mouth slowly, licking it away from the wound as it wells. His eyes are closed, and the world shrinks to the warmth in the pit of his stomach, the catlike feeling of pleasure, the warm, soft skin under his mouth.

Fingers lightly moving on the back of his head bring him back to himself. They move restlessly, half touching, half stroking over his hair, as if the person who owns them isn't sure what to do with such things as fingers. Isn't certain what is wanted from them, only that touching seems better than not touching.

Dean turns his face from Castiel's wrist, his eyes still closed. The warmth fades a little, becoming less soft, and sharper, as he remembers who he is and what he's doing. A dart of disgust at himself slices through his stomach.

Castiel moves closer in an instant, without reassurances, but without reproach, letting Dean's head rest on his shoulder without Dean having to move to put it there, one hand resting on Dean's shoulder as if it's a bird, thoughtlessly perched there.

After a while, when the awkwardness of standing in what is essentially an embrace becomes greater than his dread of looking Castiel in the eye, Dean steps away, and Castiel releases him wordlessly.

Dean wipes a hand over his mouth, finds traces of blood on his skin, and winces.

"Are you...you know, good?" He asks, feeling twitchy and nervous again, now that the ache is gone, and he has nothing to distract him from what he's just done.

Castiel considers for a moment. "Adequate."

"Meaning?"

"I'll be able to get by...that is," Castiel's brow creases, "if I'm allowed to...'spy' while you are unaware of me."

Dean blinks. "Is that...are you asking _permission, _to watch me sleep?"

"You've made your opinions on consent very clear, and I agree that without your knowledge, last night I felt...guilty."

The knowledge that last night Castiel had stayed with him, even though Dean had been unable to ask, creates a mix of several billion fractured emotions, most of which, Dean would be hard pressed to name, let alone acknowledge.

"Is that what you need to do? Just...stick close for a few hours while I'm unconscious?"

Again, Castiel's brow furrows. "It's adequate."

Again that word, the stiffness in Castiel's limbs, less from distance and more like...

"Cas, are you in pain? Like, right now?" Dean feels sickness tinge his stomach.

Castiel picks his words carefully. "I'm, not entirely comfortable, but it is manageable." As an afterthought he adds, "you don't need to overly concern yourself."

"You're letting me drink your blood – I'm concerned if you're in pain." Dean says, stubbornly. "It's because of me, isn't it? Because you need something, more than just watching me be unconscious."

Castiel avoids his glare and frowns at the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Dean sighs, and it's barbed with frustration.

"Will you just talk to me? You don't need to tiptoe round what we need to do here, ok? I don't want you to explode, but I don't want you suffering just because you think I can't handle something. So just, tell the freaking truth, all of it."

Castiel's sigh is bone deep and so weary that it makes Dean want, irrationally to tell him to get to bed, get some sleep, and not to worry, he'll take the next watch. The next hundred, if it means Castiel will rest up. Things he used to do with Sam, Bobby, the things you do when you're fighting a war on too little of everything.

"Tell me," he prompts, voice low.

"I would, if I knew." Castiel's expression is yet another reminder that he has changed, become less angel and more something other. His smile is sad, wry, aware of some irony that Dean can't quite grasp. "If I knew what was needed."

"Cas..." Dean shifts from foot to foot, arms restless, "before...when we, did that help?"

Castiel's gaze is so intense that, not for the first time, Dean wonders how far he can see into him. How much he's divining from the tiniest twitch of his face. Whether Castiel can really read his mind. Whether he would.

"I won't ask you do something against your nature."

"But if you're in pain-" Dean says, at the same time knowing that Cas is half right, it wasn't in his nature. But then, maybe his nature had changed, why? He didn't know.

"Do you think it would hurt any less?" Castiel said, heat snapping into his voice.

Dean's taken aback by it, the sudden flash of anger. There's more to it, but if his own emotions are illegible, Castiel's are in a foreign language – a dead language.

"You're...unable to talk about what became of is in purgatory." Castiel said, more calmly. "And you will be fine, without me here constantly. The blood will help with that."

It reminds him, bizarrely, of his dad, leaving him with the money he needed, the hotel roof over their heads, contact numbers, a hidden gun. Everything but what he really needed. Leaving him alone.

"What about you?"

A crease appears between Castiel's brows, just as the front door opens, and Sam enters.

Castiel disappears like snow in a fire.


	8. Chapter 8

_Those of you missing Santorum (the fic, not the asshole republican) it's over at my lj. _

Sam is really worried about his brother.

He's worried about Dean for most of his life, for various tiny reasons, worried about him when he was out alone, worried that Dean would never be able to change his life, revert back to the normalcy that had been stolen from him. He worried because of the way Dean could be around people, and still not connect with them, how he broke the world down into people who needed protecting, and people who were so strong that they had no use for him.

Sam had worried, in short, because Dean never seemed comfortable as a person, rather than a hunter.

Now he worries because Dean doesn't even seem to be human anymore.

For a start, Dean only eats when Sam is watching him, and he never clears his plate. When Sam doesn't remind him, Dean doesn't eat. And when Sam has been out, looking for leads or catching up with various people using the library computers (his laptop is dangerously close to death, the internet would probably finish it off), he returns to find no food wrappers anywhere in the motel – no evidence that Dean has eaten at all, sometimes for seven or eight hours at a time.

Even stranger, he doesn't seem to be drinking – as in, no alcohol has appeared in Dean's possession, and none of Sam's has gone missing. Dean doesn't even touch coffee, or soda. But he does have a water bottle with him all the time, which he drinks dry at least four times a day.

Sam never sees him filling it up, but he has noticed that their gallon tank of holy water is almost empty, and he only refilled it a week ago.

Then, there's all the extra sensory stuff. The way Dean seems to know, instinctively, what kind of monster or being they're dealing with. Just looking at some remote corner of the room in which the victim died and saying, "it was a ghost, probably her sister."

He's always right, and Sam is getting increasingly freaked out by the way Dean refuses to acknowledge that anything weird is going on.

Even though Sam knows he doesn't sleep – like, ever.

And even though he's stronger than any man has any right to be, even one who's been surviving in purgatory for half a decade.

Dean is in fact, completely stoic most of the time. He talks when spoken to, or when he's got something to add to Sam's stream of consciousness half-conversations. But he doesn't joke or instigate conversation.

Though sometimes he does answer questions, questions that Sam hasn't voiced yet. Questions that exist only in Sam's mind, with a quick 'Don't ask Sam.'

So yeah, Sam is worried that Dean is somehow not human, what with the mind reading and suspension of bodily function. He's even checked him with holy water (like Dean isn't drinking enough) and silver – which did nothing.

Then there are the moment, increasingly frequent, where Sam will walk into a room and feel like he's intruding, even when it's only Dean in there, looking at him with an expression that for a split second combines relief, frustration and worry.

Sometimes, at night Sam can hear him talking, through the wall. A low murmur that rises and falls throughout the night, as if Dean is talking and listening alternately. The few times Sam has peeked into the room through a crack in the door, he's seen only Dean, lying on one side, facing away from him, one arm resting across his chest, the other folded under his head, a space on the bed beside him, almost like its reserved for a second occupant.

The only thing stopping him from outright asking Dean what the hell is going on, is the fact that he can see his own concern mirrored at him, buried deep in his brother's eyes.

Dean has no idea what's going on with him, and he's scared, but he knows more than Sam, and he can only hope that Dean has it under control. Whatever it is.

So, Sam's worried, but reasonably sure that nothing too bad is happening, nothing deathly serious.

He doesn't become truly scared, until two weeks after the vampire hunt.

The day Dean exorcises his first demon since returning to the surface.

It's a standard case of following the omens, tracing them to a tiny town orbiting the slightly larger-small town of Jericho. Less of a town, more like a short street with a gas station and a few houses. They pull up, get out of the car and take a quick look around.

"No signs of life," Sam says, peering through the window of the gas station, "just broken glass and," he brushes his fingers against the window, "sulphur."

He turns around and finds that Dean isn't even looking, he's staring off to the side, down a tiny alley between the gas station and a storage shed.

"Dean?"

"There's four demons in there, with someone." Dean turns back to him, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again, like he's trying to dispel a headache. He looks as freaked out as Sam feels. "got the knife?"

Sam nods.

Dean forces open the storage shed door.

Inside there are four demons, surrounding a man who's still wearing most of his gas'n'go uniform, despite having been tortured to within an inch of death. He's still alive and whimpering on the floor, with a knife pinning his hand to the concrete.

The fight is quick and lit hectically by the swaying bare bulb overhead. Sam kills two demons, Dean downs one, then shoves another at Sam, who stabs it through the heart, but not before it knocks him into a wall and winds him. The remaining demon tackles Dean, who's weaponless, taking him to the ground and landing on top of him.

"Dean!" Sam pushes the body of the third demon to the ground and runs across the shed, but the last demon already has a knife to Dean's throat, is already pressing it to his artery, the tip producing a bead of blood.

Dean struggles, but even his new strength isn't enough to get back up from under the demon, whose meat suit is almost a heavyweight fighter, and muscled like a bear.

He flings a hand up, trying to twist the thing away from him.

The knife sinks deeper, and Sam, still meters away, knows that he will never get there in time.

He only has time to shout his brother's name again, sees Dean's eyes burn like quicksilver, then flash magnesium bright, a light that bursts out and throws Sam to the ground, almost blinded.

The demon screams, long and loud.

In the next moment, there is silence, darkness, and the heavy breathing of someone struggling not to pass out.

Sam stumbles to his feet, finally reaches Dean, who's nursing a burnt and blistered palm. The same red, raw flesh borders his eyes, and there's a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

"What the hell?" Sam says.

Dean coughs, spits bloody saliva onto the concrete.

"Not exactly."

(-*-)

Sam's driving too fast, and he'd be slowing down, if he could get his head around what Dean is telling him from his position, slumped in the passenger seat.

"You mean Cas has been back this whole time?"

"Almost."

"Son of a...why didn't you tell me?"

Dean musters up a glare. "Nice talk mister, Oh, by the way I got out of the cage after ten minutes."

Sam looks down at the wheel for a second. "Little more than that."

"Yeah...sorry," Dean shakes his head. "All I know is that...Cas's grace is, in me now, he put it there to keep me alive, and I guess that since he's never really here, it's not getting back into him, just building up in me." He coughs again, "which hurts like hell by the way."

"Well, as soon as we get back, you're going to call him, and sort this out." Sam says, "I mean, Christ, you almost burnt yourself alive back there."

"I was there, you don't need to tell me." Dean hunches up more in his seat. "Felt like Lucifer was trying break out of my freaking throat."

"So, worse than when Cas was trying to talk to you?"

"By about a thousand."

"Shit."

"Yeah."

Dean looks down at his blistered hand, the hand he'd pressed to the demon's head to push it out of its body. He can still feel the power in it, like white hot wires down his fingers. Which scares him shitless.

He hasn't told Sam the half of it, and certainly not about the blood. He knows he should have mentioned all the changes to Cas as they happened but...Cas barely stuck around long enough to give him his daily shot of angel juice before flitting off somewhere else.

Another part of Dean, the tiny, buried part that he hasn't let out since purgatory, the part he doesn't even know how to handle, has noticed how tired Castiel has looked each time he's seen him. How he's looking more and more like a ghost leaf, as if one puff of air might break his bones.

Of course, he's there at night. But Castiel is very careful, and only appears once Dean's fully asleep – no amount of faking was effective. Castiel arrived the moment Dean fell asleep, and only left again as he was waking up, remaining invisible the whole time, and never laying a hand on him.

Which clearly wasn't working, as the grace sitting in him like uranium pretty much proved.

When Sam stopped the car and they went into the abandoned house they were currently staying in, they stood in the living room awkwardly.

"I uh..." Dean looked anywhere but at Sam, "do you mind if I talk to him by myself. Privately?"

Sam's face turned watchful. "Sure. If there's something you don't want me to see."

"Like what?"

"I have no idea, but it's the thing you're not telling me." Sam said pointedly.

Dean didn't say anything. Sam knew he was hiding something, and Dean wasn't willing to admit that he was. As much push as there was pull. No give in either of them.

Sam went back out to the car, and Dean stood in the middle of the damp ruined living room and waited. The weird thing was, he didn't even have to call. The grace inside him was already doing that.

Castiel appeared almost immediately, and the air was punched out of Dean.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" he said, but he knew.

Castiel was close to meltdown.

It was like seeing him mid-leviathan overlode, only there were fissures in his skin so deep that Dean could see the inside of Cas's mouth through his cheek. One eye was dark and obscured, like a blown bulb, and his lips were so dry and cracked that he looked dead. He held his body up like it was made of sticks, and might at any second crumple to the ground.

"I..." It came out like a death rattle. "should have come sooner."

Dean stayed exactly where it was, even though his first instinct was to close the gap between them and hold Cas up. Castiel eased himself down onto the couch and gritted his teeth as if holding back a wave of pain.

"Guess we kinda overestimated how effective the whole 'being near me' things was going to be in keeping you un-exploded huh?"

Castiel didn't so much nod as wince as shiver. Then he looked properly at Dean and frowned.

"What happened?"

"You didn't feel it?" Dean is starting to get freaked out by Castiel's lack of movement, like he's a rag roll propped on the couch. "I nearly got burnt alive by grace shooting out of me."

Castiel leant back against the worn cushions and closed his eyes. "Another side effect of not stabilising my grace. I should be bleeding it out of you gradually as it accumulates. Too much and-"

"I burn up like a Molotov."

Castiel coughed and the cracks around his mouth deepened.

"How do we fix it?" Dean asked, already knowing the answer. Which was probably why Cas didn't bother answering. Then again, maybe he can't.

"Why the hell didn't you come sooner?" Dean mutters.

"You didn't want to see me," Castiel says, at the top volume he can manage, barely above a whisper.

"This isn't about me. About _that_. If you're in pain, you come see me."

"And what would you have done?"

Dean honestly has no idea. For the last few minutes he's known exactly what he needs to do to fix both of them, and he still hasn't done it. If Castiel had shown up, whole, and told him that touching him was the thing that would keep both of them alive and not in pain, would he have done it?

"Stand up."

Castiel winces, planting his hands on the couch as if he's preparing for an assault on the enemy. Reluctantly Dean steps in, puts his hand around Cas's upper arm and pulls him upright. Castiel sways on his feet, until Dean takes his other shoulder, holding him still.

For a second he just looks at Castiel's ruined face, at the eye shadowed in pain, the other dull and opaque as dirt. He feels like he should say something, and squashes the idea with as much mental force as he can summon.

He holds Castiel firmly at arms length, the better to pull away once he's done this, and then moves forwards and kisses him.

Castiel's mouth is just as dry as it had looked, and he doesn't even move when Dean starts kissing him, just stands there, like he's about to drop dead any second. A few seconds into it, Dean feels heat prickle up his throat, and with one rushed breath, grace starts to whisper out of him. Casitel's tense shoulders ease down, and he groans softly, hands creeping up to press meekly into the folds of Dean's jacket.

As more grace passes back into him, Castiel sags in relief. Dean doesn't want to think about how long the angel has been in pain, or how much strength, how much determination not to involve him it must have taken to stay away.

Dean pulls away to catch his breath, and opens his eyes long enough to see that Castiel once again looks like himself, with light moving under his skin like sap in a plant.

"Dean..." Cas starts to say, still whispering, but not in pain anymore. Like the whisper you use in church.

"Shhhh." Without meaning to, Dean's hand has found its way to Castiel's face, rough against his perennial stubble. He kisses him again short and sharp, then long, deeper.

Castiel holds him back. "Do you remember?"

Dean nods, kisses him again, again. Because he does remember this, remembers when he didn't have this twist in the pit of his stomach, when Cas had touched every part of him, and he hadn't been scared shitless by the idea that he'd been wrong his whole life. That he _is_ wrong.

Castiel takes his hand and heals it, brushes his fingers over Dean's eyes and makes the blisters vanish.

"Sam will be worried."

"Sam's always worried."

Castiel pushes him gently, but firmly away. "I think I should go."

"Where do you go anyway, when you're not here?"

Castiel's eyes trail over the walls. "Around."

"Can't imagine heaven's that great this time of year."

"I haven't been."

Dean can kind of understand why, given what the other angel's had said around him and Cas.

"Well, just, you know..." he slides his hands into his jeans pocket. "come whenever you want." He meets Castiel's eyes. "It doesn't suck, having you around."

Castiel's smile is small, almost invisibly. Fortunately, Dean knows how to read them.


	9. Chapter 9

_Those of you missing Santorum (the fic, not the asshole republican) it's over at my lj. _

_So...the new series starts in a few days and I...can't honestly say that I'll be finishing this fic. But I'll give it my best. If I don't get too depressed. (here's to hoping all this becomes canon). _

Dean's not good at this. In fact, he doesn't even know what this is.

All he knows is that, Sam is watching him like a hawk, and Cas is flitting in and out of their cases with the regularity of an absent minded nurse checking her patients. He appears in the back of the car, in their motel rooms, in diners and liquor stores. Sometimes Dean'll be in the shower, walk back into the bedroom and find Castiel sitting on the end of his bed, looking out of the window.

Dean's back to drinking, drinking more than normal, if he's honest. It makes it easier. And by that he doesn't mean it as in everything. He means 'it'.

'It' is the moment, every night, when he goes to his room. Because he and Sam have separate rooms now. Not usually in a motel, but normally in an old house, or an abandoned warehouse. Anywhere they can hide from the leviathans that are still out there.

When he goes to bed, Castiel is sometimes there, and sometimes not. When he is, Dean looks at him for a second, then turns his back and takes off his shoes, jacket, over shirt, socks and, after a pause where he feels the hair on his neck bristle in awkwardness, his t-shirt. Then he climbs between the folds of his army surplus sleeping bag, lays his head on his duffle, and stares fixedly at the wall until Castiel comes to lie down next to him, putting his arms, bare in their shortsleeved scrub top, inside the bag. Hands cool and dry as they settle on his hot shoulders.

When Castiel isn't there, Dean allows himself to forget that Castiel will eventually come, because he comes every night. So he strips off and gets into bed. Sometimes he falls asleep. Castiel always wakes him when he appears, he can't not, as years of hunting have put Dean's sleep/wake reflex on a hair trigger.

Nights are when Castiel gets his grace back.

Days are when he feeds it into Dean all over again.

In the mornings, Dean rolls over, barely awake and Castiel is always ready with his knife, cutting his forearm, his wrist, and, as if he's craving something closer than barely there touches in the dark and Dean's lips on his arm, his throat.

Dean blocks it out when it's happening. He doesn't want to think about it, when he's out with Sam, working, or sitting in a bar waiting for his glass to be refilled. He doesn't want to remember what Castiel feels like under him, or the way his blood tastes as it pours out of Castiel's white throat and into his mouth. He doesn't want to think about the way Castiel shivers under him, the way his hands clutch his back, cool, dry fingers trembling against his bare skin.

He doesn't want to remember what it's like to get hard on top of someone who would let him take, and take and take.

Someone who he doesn't, can't, shouldn't want.

It's fucking up his head and that's why he drinks. He drinks to make it easier, that's all.

To keep that feeling out. The feeling he had in purgatory 24/forever.

The feeling that (downing a beer) Castiel was (shot of whisky) different (fifth of whiskey).

That Castiel was (can't find his fucking car) somehow (stumbling on the gravel lot) someone he lov- (passing out on the floor of his room).

(-*-)

Dean doesn't feel it when Castiel lies down next to him, taking back the excess of grace that he's poured into Dean's body. It has the...flavour of Dean. A vague tint of Dean-ness that hums in his veins, and thuds sickly in his heart.

He knows Dean is struggling. That he isn't happy.

But he can't fix that, and his lack of understanding of what Dean is thinking, of what he's feeling, is frustrating Castiel deeply.

There's a push and pull in Dean, both literal and metaphorical. Dean pushed against him, or pulls him close, but he also shoves him away, and pulls himself back. That, and Dean's emotions, which swell and rush forwards like the tides, so long held back that they're too strong, destructive, frightening.

Then they rush away again, dragging grit between their fingernails as they're pulled back into the tumultuous mass.

He understands Dean, to a certain degree. The freedom he'd had in purgatory, freedom from the designation of his name, his familial ties, Dean had changed, and had allowed certain parts of himself to escape a punishing grip that had been exerted on them since they'd appeared. Dean's rigid control had softened, and he'd opened up because there was no one there to see – only Castiel, and Castiel wasn't human. He didn't count.

Now, back in the 'real' world, Dean was scared. Scared of himself, of Sam's prying, of what Castiel might reveal, that, somehow, the things they'd done were written on him, or maybe Castiel's scent, his touch lingered. That people would know.

And even if it was always kept a secret – Dean knows, and that's enough to hurt him. The knowledge that he is something other. Something he'd tried to unknow for...maybe the whole of his life. And he'd succeeded, until purgatory. Until now.

Dean was, if Castiel were forced to boil the man down into his components and extract the bitter truth of him – scared, stubborn, and angry.

But he was also, if the brief snatches Castiel felt in him were genuine (quickly quashed as they were) almost, on the edge, of loving him.

Maybe not the way he'd loved Lisa, that soft, warm love that Castiel had seen in him. Not the way he loved Sam, right to the heart, no matter how bloody, how raw. Not how he loved his father, in secret, half ashamed that after everything, he still cares for the man who broke his life.

Dean (almost, if only he'd let it in) loves him, the way Castiel feels for him.

Like the persecuted men who had prayed silently to God from their hiding places.

The way a man in a desert loves water and shade.

Love, on instinct, carved deeper than the root of life. Absolute, even unto death.

And if Castiel could only say this, he knows it would hurt less inside, when he has to leave Dean, or sit away from him and pretend that he knows nothing, sees nothing.

But he can't stand the thought of saying it. He fears the moment that the words will come out of his mouth.

The same way Dean fears the moment he'll have to hear them.

(-*-)

The breaking point comes unexpectedly, and strangely, it's Sam who breaks first, despite the fact that he isn't part of the confusing struggle that Dean and Castiel are locked in.

Sam's been struggling with himself over what to do about Dean. On the one hand, he wants to let Dean deal in his own time, on the other, he's still freaking out that his brother managed to exorcise a demon with only a touch.

He's not blind, Sam knows that Castiel is involved, deeply, in what's wrong with Dean. So far, there hasn't been a repeat of the incident, Dean has gone back to eating and sleeping and drinking as normal. But sometimes, usually near the end of the day, or early in the morning, Dean acts strangely. At night he insists on his own room, even at motels, and if he's late getting to bed he starts to squint and blink, like he's got a migraine. His hands don't stay still and he acts for all the world like an addict going through withdrawal.

Yet he seems almost reluctant to go to bed.

And in the morning, Dean picks at his breakfast, a cast over his eyes, and he snaps at Sam or ignores him entirely. Dean looks...guilty, then, like he's done something shameful that he wishes to forget.

And Sam is tired of waiting for an explanation that may never come.

So, he does what anyone would do in such a situation. He intervenes.

One morning he gets up, early, and sneaks up to Dean's room, listening at the door.

He can hear movement, low, shuffling sounds like Dean's moving in his sleep. Only...there's a rhythmic nature to them that makes Sam pause by the door, his suspicions still raised.

That's when he hears it, quiet, but definitely there, a wet, hungry sound, and a soft, guttural moan.

A moan that definitely isn't Dean's.

Sam realises that he has two choices, walk away, or open the door.

If he walks away, then everything will be like before, only, he'll know something that Dean wants to keep hidden, and that Dean will probably never talk to him about, even if they both live to be a hundred years old.

If he opens the door...there'll be a moment of utter stillness, and then everyone will know everything.

Sam pushes open the door, and freezes.

He'd suspected, hearing what he'd heard, that Dean was with someone, with Castiel. That maybe they were...well, Sam wouldn't have been surprised to find them together, something's been there for a while, however mangled it's gotten, it's still there.

But no, they're not doing anything that could be described as sex. Although Dean is on top of Castiel, and, judging by the smell in the room, he's quite possibly still half drunk from the night before. Half naked, with Castiel's hands clutching his back, Dean is moving against him half unconsciously, mouth to Castiel's throat.

There's blood on his mouth, and blood running down his chin.

Sam feels sick, completely cold, and stuck, staring. He takes a step back, and all he wants is to end what he's looking at, to make it stop and break it up without having to engage with it, without having to admit that he's there.

That's the only reason he can think of, the only justification for what he does.

He takes out the knife he keeps in his pocket, slashes his palm, and, with shaking fingers, smears an Enochian symbol on the wall. It barely looks like anything, but, when he slaps his hand down on it, there's a blinding light, a short, sharp sound, and Castiel is gone.

Sam steps into the room, grabs Dean's arm and jerks him over onto his back, looking down at his brother's blood smeared mouth and dark eyes.

Dean lets out a gasp, teeth gritting, his body stiffening like he's grasped a livewire.

And then he screams.


	10. Chapter 10

_Those of you missing Santorum (the fic, not the asshole republican) it's over at my lj. There's a new update as of Friday. _

_Also, my new novel 'After the Fall' will be out soonish, so keep an eye on my twitter JollySnidge, for updates, and go to my wordpress 'Sarah Goodwin, a Writer' for details of the plot._

Sam stands, frozen in horror, watching as Dean's whole body sizes up, cords standing out on his neck as his face turns red and his teeth sink into his bloodied lip, until more blood, his own, runs over his chin.

"Dean?" Sam inches forwards, and Dean's head tips back, another terrible, animal scream coming out of him until his throat dries up and only a hoarse moan of pain comes out. He doesn't seem able to draw breath, or have any control over his movements.

Sam moves closer, hands clutching at Dean's hand. Blood appears in his brother's tear ducts, the skin on his cheek ruptures and blood flows freely down his face and onto the bed. Dean's eyes roll, and he chokes, blood spluttering between his lips, even as he tries to scream, and produces nothing but blood and strangled air.

The sharp smell of urine mixes with that of blood in the air, and Sam realises that the seizure, or rictus that's gripping Dean is going to kill him, in seconds.

Strong hands push Sam away, so hard that he hits the wall on the other side of the room and falls to the floor. He turns, and sees Castiel leaning over Dean, wrist slashed upwards, almost to the elbow, a clumsy arching slash. With the other hand he's pried Dean's clenched teeth open, forcing his wrist to Dean's mouth.

Sam struggles to his feet.

Castiel turns towards him, and Sam jerks backwards in shock, because the angel's face is so intensely furious that he looks capable of murdering Sam with his bare hands, and ripping him to pieces.

"Cas-"

"You could have killed him," Castiel thunders, oblivious to the great, starving pulls that are being taken of his blood. Dean is shaking on the bed, the soaked sheets sticking to him. "You almost did."

"I didn't know!"

"You didn't think!" Castiel's eyes are so dark that Sam is actually scared.

"Is he going to be ok?"

Castiel looks down at Dean, one hand going to cup the back of his head.

"It's taking too long," he mutters, turning back to Sam, "Get me a needle."

"Wha-"

"A needle, now Sam." Castiel orders, and Sam sprints out of the room and back to his bag, scrambling for the first aid kit, with it's dressings and thread, and a pack of two hypodermic needles, large ones, which he's most often used for dosing vampires with dead man's blood.

He runs back to Castiel, clutching the pack, and tears one free, handing it to the angel.

Castiel doesn't take it, he just offers his uninjured arm.

"He needs more in his system, quickly," Castiel says, some of the fury gone from his voice.

Sam's fingers shake as he inserts the needle into Castiel's arm, drawing a syringe full of blood.

"Where-"

"His limbs, and the heart." Castiel looks at him. "Sam, if I stop feeding him, he'll die. Do this quickly please."

Sam sinks the needle into his brother's arm and watches, with a sick feeling in his stomach, as the blood moves under Dean's skin, like djinn poison. He refills the syringe, injects the other arm. The he has to strip the wet jean's off of Dean and inject the crook of each knee.

With one last look at Castiel, Sam aims the needle between Dean's ribs, right into his heart, and pushes the plunger down.

Castiel pulls his arm away from Dean, just as the hunter gasps, jerking upwards into a sitting position and grasping the bed to keep himself upright. Dean fights for breath, his mouth entirely red with blood, all over his chin and most of his cheeks. When he looks up, Sam sees that his eyes are bright blue.

"Leave, Sam." Castiel tell him.

And God help him, Sam does.

(-*-)

As soon as Dean is able, about thirty seconds after Sam leaves the room, he locks himself away in the adjoining bathroom, and leaves Castiel alone.

He'd expected it, and holds no ill will at Dean for retreating to regain his composure. Castiel sits on the side of the bed, the sheets made clean and new again with a thought.

Then he waits.

When Dean returns, his hair is wet and Castiel surmises that he's submerged his head in the grimy basin to remove the blood from his face. Still, some of it lingers, a darkish tattoo, red filigree at the corners of his mouth and at the faint stubble on his throat.

He's naked, underwear presumably having been discarded while he cleaned himself up, and the first thing he does is dart for the clothes that are spilling out of his duffle bag. Eyes purposefully avoiding Castiel, he pulls on underwear, jeans and a shirt, face tense and stiff with anger.

"Dean-"

"You still here?" Dean doesn't turn around, toughs it out instead. But there's an edge to his voice, or rather, a crack in it.

"I will never let that happen again."

"How, by staying with me 24/7?" Dean all but growls, "Getting a little tired of your face being the first and last thing I see every day." He kicks the duffle viciously. "I'm getting tired of living like this."

"I know, I-" but Castiel's soft voice is lost in another lash of bitterness.

"It's like we never got out! Like we're still crouching in the dark, acting like monsters because there's nothing else." Dean finally turns, and he's drawn with anger, and even though Castiel knows a lot of it is directed inwards, there's still plenty of hatred for him pasted across Dean's face.

"And you, are you even trying, to fix this? To fix me?" Dean's almost trembling with anger, but something else as well, "or do you like having me like this? Huh? Desperate, needing you? What do you think you're going to get out of me if you keep this going long enough?"

"I'm not trying to get anything out of you." Castiel says calmly, though inside he's anything but calm.

"Bullshit," Dean snarls, "you think that you can...that you can get _that_ from me? Like before? You're dead wrong. Understand?" He swallows, gathering his reserves of spite. "I'd rather die than let you."

Castiel takes it silently. He can't say that he doesn't want what they shared before, because that would be a lie. He doesn't want to lie anymore. Still, there's a different between deceit, and guarding himself for further pain.

Dean almost visibly deflates. "I can't believe Sam saw..." he shakes his head.

"You can explain to him."

"Yeah, that's gonna go down great."

"He'll understand. Or try to. And I can't imagine he'll be angry with you for surviving, in order to return to him."

Dean looks at the ground, then up, uncertainty warring with anger, warring with shame. "He's going to ask questions."

"Then answer them."

Dean doesn't say anything.

"He loves you, and you've forgiven each other a great many things in the time I've known you...and in this case, there's nothing to forgive."

Dean shakes his head, a bitter half smile edging his mouth. "And you'd say that because you're not human. You don't know how we work."

"I know what shame is," Castiel says quietly. "I know how it feels to do the wrong thing for the right reasons."

"And that's what I did."

Castiel meets his eyes unflinchingly. "I think we did the right thing, for the wrong reason, because it was the only reason you'd allow yourself to believe excused you."

Dean's gaze is like a knife, but Castiel holds it, unwilling to let his point fall on deaf ears.

"You don't say anything like that to me again, understand?" Dean says finally.

"Then don't tell me you'd rather die, than have me. Because you already made that choice, and we're both still here."

Dean grits his teeth, but Castiel knows that he's gotten through. Somewhere, under that shell that is Dean Winchester, is the soul that shared itself with him. The bright, irrepressible truth of the man he loves. The man he's killed for, died for.

Dean is the first to look away, muttering, "Don't ask me for anything Cas, you know I can't give it to you."

Castiel almost smiles. Almost. He's had nothing for his entire existence. Duty, fraternity, his love for his unseen father. That was all. And only in the last blink of his life has he begun to experience _this_.

Dean may be unable, or unwilling to give him more than unspoken, harsh-backed, half-love, but it's far more than he has had for himself in forever.

He disappears without another word.

(-*-)

Dean goes downstairs, still feeling shaky but hiding it well, or so he thinks. Sam can see the weakness in his limbs, the way he holds himself.

Dean comes to a stop in front of where Sam is sitting, toying with his laptop and not paying attention to the screen.

"Cas gone?"

"Yeah."

"I'm really sorry I uh...I shouldn't have sent him away. I just didn't know what..." He frowns, "Dean, what _is_ going on?"

"Cliff notes?" Dean sits down and lays his arms on the table. "In purgatory, there's nothing for people to eat. So...when I got to starving, Cas gave me his blood to keep me going."

Sam says nothing, just sits, processing. Then he closes his eyes briefly, and nods. "Ok, I get that...but why now? You're out."

"Cas's blood wasn't exactly regular, human blood. It had grace in it, and when he started to get weaker, he was taking bits of his own personal energy, and putting it into me to keep me alive."

"And what? Now you're...addicted or..."

"No..." Dean wets his lips, this is the part he can't quite make himself comfortable with. The part he wishes had never happened, because it means he can't close off the part of him that had woken up in purgatory. "Cas got torn up by a monster, and to save him, I...gave him, part of my energy. My soul."

"You haven't got a soul."

"I have half of one."

"And Cas has the rest?"

"Yeah, only, without his grace in me, my half of the soul starts...bleeding, and it's like I'm back in the pit."

"Like you're being tortured?" Sam's face takes on a grey tinge. "So, when I sent Cas away..."

"I'm guessing you banished his grace from me."

"Dean, I'm sorry I-"

"Not your fault. I should have explained." Dean sighs. "Thing is, I'm drinking Cas's blood to stay sane and not in freaking agony, but if too much grace builds up in me, weird shit like what happened with that demon happens."

"So, how does the grace get out?"

Dean's jaw tightens. "It just...goes."

Sam narrows his eyes. "You're not telling me everything."

"No I'm not."

Sam searches his face for any signs of the truth, but Dean's gotten way too good at lying over the years.

"You can tell me...Dean, I don't want to end up almost killing you again."

"You won't."

"But if I don't know-"

"It's not important." Dean tells him, "It's just...you know, stuff."

"This the stuff that's been bothering you since you got back?" Sam pauses. "Stuff that involves you and Castiel...being close?"

"Close." Dean repeats, brows knitting.

"Close like I saw you this morning." Sam says. "I'm not an idiot Dean, and I'm certainly not as blind as you. Two guys, one half naked, onto of each other, moving like that, making the sounds Cas was...what do you think that adds up to?"

"A great big pile of none-of-your-damn-business' Dean tells him, "I know what you're thinking, and you can just stop now because there is nothing going on."

"Why? Because you're saying so?"

"Yes."

"And that makes it not what it is – just because you say it's not?"

"I'm saying I wouldn't let it happen." Dean grits out. "And that's all there is to it."


	11. Chapter 11

_Hello! and, just to let you know, my new novel 'After the Fall' is out now on Amazon, and over at Lulu._

It gets worse.

Dean hadn't know it even could get worse, but is has. Because now that Sam knows what an angel banishing can do to him, he's gone into over-protective mode. If a demon uses that symbol on Castiel, or even near Dean, it could kill him, so Dean can't go on hunts that have even the slightest whiff of demon activity about them. He has to stay in a double protected hotel room, warded against demons, and against angels, keeping himself safe.

It's boring and frustrating, and Dean would say it was the worst thing, except that it's coupled with Sam trying to talk to him about purgatory, and about Cas, and he'd rather stay in a locked cell for the rest of his life than talk about that.

Then there's Cas himself, who, it's safe to say, is pissed with him. Only he's pissed in a uniquely Cas kind of way, because he shows up, ponys up his blood, or sticks his hand on Dean's face to draw out the excess energy, and then flits off again.

Dean knows it has to be hurting him, he remembers what happened to Castiel when they first came back, and that by not spending enough time hanging around with him the angel had to be in a lot of discomfort, even pain.

Still, he couldn't bring himself to suggest that Castiel should maybe stay for a while.

He gets through the days the only way he knows how, by drinking, picking fights with Sam, with witnesses, with strangers, and finally, inevitably, with Castiel himself.

It happens one night, about a month after Sam got clued into the whole mess, Dean comes back to the house late. It's an abandoned little place a few miles out of town, and, because there are no demons around, Sam had let him go out for a drink. Well, Sam was probably glad to have him out of the way. They weren't talking much these days, either Sam was angry with him for being so angry all the time, or Sam was trying to give him space. Either way it was tense silence ten hours a day.

Dean was drunk, very drunk. He hadn't been when he'd first left the bar, with a girl. But after they were finished, in a lay-by on a road with no signs and no passing cars, he'd driven her back to town, then parked up and finished the bottle that he'd found rolling under the car seats. By the time he got back he wasn't exactly stumbling, but is was close.

He got in, went upstairs without checking on Sam, and went into his room.

Castiel was sitting on the edge of the bed, frowning at the wall.

Dean sucked in a breath and sighed, turning away and throwing his jacket over a stack of planks that someone had left against the wall.

"Hello to you too," Castiel said.

It was the sarcasm that made Dean take note. Cas had been many things since purgatory, but snappy wasn't one of them. He sat down heavily on the bed.

"Get it over with then."

Castiel reached out and put his hand on Dean's, where it lay on his knee. He gripped it with what was probably very little of his actual strength, but it was far from gentle, and the roughness felt pointed.

Dean snatched his hand back and Castiel stood up and walked across the room, examining the cracks in the plaster.

"What the hell are you so pissy about?" Dean shot at him, because even from his vantage point he could tell that Castiel's teeth were gritted. A nice human trick he appeared to have added to his angsty repertoire.

"The fact that you were with a woman before you came here."

Dean hadn't actually expected a direct answer. Castiel usually ignored his digs and vanished. Not today though.

"I'm sorry," said Casitel, not sounding sorry at all, "was I supposed to lie?"

"Sorry if I hurt your precious feelings, shouldn't you be storming off now?"

Castiel turned and glared at him.

"I am not human," he began,

"Well that's fucking obvious."

"I am not human," Castiel snapped, "and so if you think that this...antagonism, changes anything, then you are sadly mistaken. It may help you to sling barbs at strangers, but I am not blind to what is beneath your...performance. And neither is Sam."

Dean stood up. "So you've been spying on me, again?"

"I spoke to Sam."

"Why the hell are you going behind my back to-"

"He called me!" Castiel said, cutting across him, "he called, I came, as you told me to do, remember? Even if I had nothing to offer."

Dean's body stiffened. "What did you tell him?"

"Not that he didn't already know."

"Cas-"

"That you're a stubborn idiot with more anger than sense, and that right now you hate everyone, especially anyone who sees you as more than the nothing you perceive yourself to be."

Dean glared at him for fifteen whole seconds.

"Get out."

Castiel shook his head.

"Now, Cas."

"No."

"Get out, or-"

"Or what? You cannot banish me, Dean. You can't make me go away when you find me inconvenient...so now we're even."

"Even!" Dean exploded, "You seriously think we will ever be even? After everything that..." he shook his head. "We are never going to be the same. Do you get that? Never. I don't care what we went though, I don't care that you have part of my soul, I am never going to love you."

Castiel sighed. "This isn't about that."

"Oh, sure."

"I am not trying to...coerce you into feeling for me." Castiel said vehemently, "I am not trying to force you to..." he broke off and shook his head, "the reason I'm here, the reason I keep coming here is because, quite aside from needing to be here, I want, to be here. I want, to be with you. And, while that should probably be taken as a measure of just how masochistic I have become, it is also because I have a part of your soul, and it tells me, constantly, exactly who you are. And you are not angry with me."

"Yeah I am."

Castiel looked at him. "You're terrified, Dean."

"No, I'm not." Dean shook his head, "I don't know what you're on but-"

"You know, you don't have to be." Castiel said, his fierceness softening until Dean really wishes he could stop his ears against it, and just not hear. "There are a lot of things to be afraid of right now, but I am not one of them...I wouldn't-"

"Shut up."

"...hurt you."

"Just shut up! I am not scared, I am not in denial. I want you to get out. I want you gone. Now."

He's so surprised when Castiel vanishes, that for a second he can't quite believe it.

And when the shock is followed by an ache, he forces it aside, and lies out on the bed, kicking off his shoes, and falling into a deep, intoxicated sleep.

The next morning, he emerges late, and finds that Sam is already up, and dressed, and has eaten breakfast. He's sitting in the desolate 'living room' and cleaning his guns, something that Sam actually hates doing, which is how Dean knows he's not going to like what's coming. The only reason Sam would willingly do it, was if he wanted to be available for talking, which he couldn't do if he was down at the library or internet café researching their latest monster.

Dean sat down on the sagging couch and picked up a knife and a sharpening block.

Sam went on polishing.

After a while he said, "So, walls are pretty thin here."

Dean said nothing.

Sam sighed. "I heard you fighting with Cas...sounded pretty serious."

"It wasn't."

"What was it about?"

"Just, you know, Cas stuff. Heaven, angels, rising cost of myrrh."

"Dean."

"Look, it's not important, can you just leave it?"

"No, I can't."

"Why?"

"Because it's never going to go away. As long as you need him, he'll be here, twice a day, and I cannot take you biting my head off all day in between. I cannot take you being angry 24/7, and I cannot risk you being drunk on a hunt, or getting angel zapped because you don't want to stay here, and see Cas."

Dean looked down at the knife, scraped it back and forwards, testing the edge every fifth stroke.

"Are you even listening?" Sam demanded.

"Yes."

"And?"

"Cas hasn't been by this morning."

Sam looked worried. "Why not? Don't you need him to...if you don't get his blood, won't it hurt you?"

Dean shrugged. "He'll be here later."

"Because he wouldn't leave you, or punish you for making things hard for him."

Dean glared. "What the hell does that mean?"

"It means that you're being an ass. And Castiel is probably suffering right now because of you."

"Sam, do me a favour and just stay out of this."

"I don't even know what 'this' is!" Sam said, exasperated. "Why are you being so...I don't get it, ok? Is this about you needing his blood, or..."

"Or what?"

Sam looked him dead in the eye. "About you being gay, Dean."

There was a handful of frozen seconds, where Dean just stared at him. Then his eyes fell to the knife and started sharpening again. After a moment more he said,

"I'm not gay."

"So what is the deal with you and Castiel right now? Because the way he looks sometimes...the way he talked to me when I called him..."

"Which you shouldn't have done."

"He's in love with you." Sam said, loudly, making Dean's whole body break out in uncomfortable gooseflesh. "And whatever happened with you two in purgatory, I seriously doubt it stopped with just you giving him part of your soul. I saw it on your face the second I brought you back. You were terrified."

Dean threw the knife down and stood up. "I am not gay."

Sam looked up at him, and Dean was struck by the look on his face. Sam didn't believe him.

"Did you and Cas have sex, in purgatory?" Sam asked.

"I'm not-"

"I'm not asking if you're gay. I'm asking if you and Cas had sex."

Dean's face set, hard. "No."

"So you did." Sam said, knowing Dean's lying face better than anyone else. Almost anyone. "and since you got back."

"No."

"But you've come close."

"No." Dean looked away.

"Do you love him?" It was costing Sam a lot to ask these questions. To push so far against the grain of his brother that he could see Dean's psyche shifting, crumbling. To assault him, and make him talk about what he'd been hiding for months.

"No."

"Thought so."

Dean looked like he wanted to kill him. Actual, burning anger radiated from him so strongly that Sam was actually a little scared.

"We don't have to talk about it anymore, right now. If you don't want to."

Dean walked out of the room, and second later Sam heard the sound of the car starting up outside. The rasp of gravel as Dean drove away.

He didn't know then that he wouldn't be seeing his brother for over a week.


	12. Chapter 12

_Guys, this is the last part. I think this is where I want to end it, and, thanks everyone, for sticking with me through updates thick and thin._

For six days, Dean drives as much as he's able, and sleeps at the side of the road. He forgets to eat, and mostly just grabs a bag of chips or jerky from the side of the cash register when he's paying for gas. He sleeps about three hours a night, and about the same during the day. He doesn't drink, and kids himself that it's because he's driving, when that's never bothered him before. Really he needs to be sober to be alert. He needs to think, and thinking is the reason he usually resorts to alcohol.

The only reason he doesn't slip into crazy, soul rending torment, is because every morning, when he wakes up, there's a syringe of blood on the front seat of the car.

He uses it, knowing that it's Cas's, knowing that he must have stopped by to sap away some of the extra grace that's hanging around in him, but that he'd gone away again, probably to report back to Sam.

It makes him equal parts angry and frustrated, but he's cheerlessly glad that Castiel is bothering to take care of him.

For six days, Dean thinks about things. Most of those things have little to do with anything, as far as he's concerned, but he can feel that they're connected to things that he'd run a mile from if they approached him dead on. He takes a slanted, meandering path through his mind, keeping himself busy on well travelled routes, and occasionally forcing himself to consider dark byways and trails off into the deep unknown.

The thing is, he thinks to himself, it's not that he's scared of being gay. He's not scared of anything, point of fact, except maybe Hell, or losing Sam. Serious stuff that can actually hurt him. Being gay is fine. He's never hated gays, never questioned the reality that there were some guys, and girls, who just weren't wired like others. Just like some people were wired up to be Mom's or marines or whatever. It was in you, or it wasn't.

He's not worried about how Sam'll take it, he isn't even particularly concerned about what his Dad would say if he was alive. Fact was, he'd probably be a lot more angry about the whole Lucifer thing, about Dean making a deal with a demon, failing at protecting Sam from the pit, real stuff like that.

He could look at it objectively, hands on the wheel, eyes levelly looking out on the tarmac streaming towards him, and say that, maybe he was a little gay, or a bit of both, maybe. He'd slept with women, and now he'd slept with Castiel. He'd liked it, at the time, but he wasn't sure he'd want to do it again, now that things were, for want of a better word, normal.

That was the question he was facing.

Sam had pushed it on him. He'd assumed and told him that he was gay, that he loved Castiel. And, that was something Dean was not prepared to consider. Men in the abstract, in the figurative, were a possibility, never say never and all that crap. But Castiel? Castiel wasn't even human, he wasn't even a man, not really. He was a thing. A creature, like a demon or a...shifter. A thing with wings and a sword and other stuff that Dean didn't even really understand. The idea that Castiel would have a beer with him, or share a motel bed with him, was so painfully ridiculous that Dean would have laughed if it had been the slightest bit funny.

But, every time he thought he had the answer pinned down, just as he'd convinced himself that the whole idea was stupid, and Sam was just blowing it out of proportion, and of course he wasn't gay, he'd just been in a desperate situation, and while he wasn't a bigot he was certainly not attracted to any guy, let alone one being puppeted by a divine, celestial being...

He couldn't quite believe it.

Dean couldn't help but remember, usually when he was trying to sleep, or sinking a needle into his arm, that Castiel had forced him to live when they were trapped in purgatory. Castiel had made him carry on. Castiel had been there, consistently, always, there. And when they'd been...when they'd had sex, it had been...different, to how he'd felt pretty much every time he'd...

That was usually the point where his guts turned hot and liquid, and the whole furious internal argument began all over again.

On the seventh day, a little after one in the morning, Dean stopped the car at the side of the road, got out and made his way up a short slope into some dense trees, the edge of a forest he'd been driving through for a while. If he hadn't been so tired, he might have appreciated the irony.

Surrounded by thick trunks covered in moss and hanging with old creepers and dead branches, Dean set his face and tried to think like he had done, all those months ago, in purgatory.

When he heard the crumpled swoosh of feathers, he realised he'd stopped running.

Castiel didn't say anything, and Dean didn't turn around to look at him for a long while. Thoughts, seemingly at random, flashed through his head, the same thoughts he'd been having for the last six days. Finally he turned around, and found Castiel standing, rumpled and stiff, across from him.

"How's Sam?" he asked, after a silent beat passed between them.

"Worried, but...he understands, why you need to do this."

"I'm glad he does." Dean muttered, "you couldn't fill me in on that could you?"

Castiel just looked at him.

"Are you ok?" Dean asked, eyes flicking to the trees to his left, then back to Castiel.

Castiel shrugged, as if his condition was of no concern to him.

Dean sighed. "I mean, are you getting all...nuclear fallout?"

"No."

Dean swallowed. The leaves overhead fluttered as the branches flexed in the wind. Several fell, tumbling to the ground between them.

"Whatever Sam thinks...I'm not gay."

Castiel patiently absorbed the information, managing to seem interested without changing his expression or uttering a single syllable.

"I've slept with women, I like, sleeping with women. Just because we had sex, doesn't make me gay, and it doesn't mean I'm in love with you, or that I want to do it again."

"I understand that."

"But you're still hanging around, being all...and acting like you know something that I don't. Like you think I love you."

"You do."

"You just said-"

"I said I understood that you choosing to have sex with me didn't mean that you loved me. But that doesn't mean that you don't love me."

Dean stood for a moment, finding his bearings, finding his own thoughts in the messed up piles of stuff that had clogged up his head over the last few days.

"Cas, I don't know how to explain that-"

"Do you think this is easy?" Castiel asked suddenly.

"What?"

"This. Coming here. Coming to you, again and again, and telling you these things, when you won't believe me, or you won't listen." Castiel took a breath, and Dean realised that, while he had been beating himself up for six days, Castiel had been doing likewise. "Dean, if I didn't love you, I wouldn't say that I did. And if I didn't know, beyond certainty, that you loved me, I wouldn't be telling you. I'd be silent. And I would do whatever you needed me to. Just like I've been doing since we met. But I can't keep silent, if your pride is the only reason-"

"Pride?" Dean exploded, "Pride, seriously? That's what you're throwing at me? Cas, I'm not proud, of anything. I've screwed the world more often than I've halfway saved it, Sam's a better person than I am, and that isn't down to me, and I can't even seem to die right. I'm not proud, ok? Of anything."

"You should be," Castiel said, "if you could see what the world would be, what I would be, if you hadn't broken the order of things...mostly I can't even imagine how terrible it would be."

"You see, that's what I'm talking about ," Dean said, jerking one arm up, gesturing sharply. "you can think like that, you can see this whole big picture, because you're an angel, Cas. After everything, all the times you thought you'd screwed up, someone up there still likes you. God keeps giving you back your wings."

Castiel frowned, "Your point being?"

Dean almost laughed, almost, like a dry twig cracking, it stuck in his throat.

"You're an angel." He repeated, "why the hell do you want me?"

Silence dominated the clearing, even the trees seemed to stop rustling.

"Dean," Castiel began slowly, "you might not see it, and, I don't know how to show you, but you're just going to have to believe that, while you're far from perfect, even in my eyes, you are worth the feelings that I have for you...and, as far as being an angel goes, I'm not convinced I was ever a very good one."

"But you are. You're some...huge beam of light in some other dimension, and," Dean said, his voice carrying through the trees. "Even if we could even begin to work out how the hell the two of us could even fit into a normal life, we wouldn't even have started before things go screwed up, because in case you haven't noticed, people I love, they tend to suffer beyond the telling of it, and die."

It took a second for Dean to realise that he'd said it. He'd told Castiel he loved him.

And he meant it.

And suddenly it was like being back in purgatory, the world was wide and open, and full of danger. And Dean felt very very small. Small, but not alone.

Castiel took a step forwards, then stopped as if he was afraid Dean would bolt off into the trees. He glanced down, as if thinking, then raised his eyes to Dean's once more.

"Dean, I'm going to be here. I can't promise that I'll live forever, or that I'll never have to leave to take care of something. But I will come back. I don't really know what kind of relationship it is that you want, and, I'm not sure you do either...but we can start from here. From me being here."

Dean looks at him, at the ground, at nothing. He gets what Castiel is offering. The more and the less that the angel is willing to accept. Castiel is a million year old thing alright, but Dean realises that that makes him a hell of a lot different to pretty much any guy or girl. He's patient, and strong, and, he gets him. Dean's never denied that. Castiel understands that he's a hunter. But he's also seen him, in Hell, purgatory, in the worst parts of his life.

And, maybe, if he's around...maybe things can get to be as good as they felt before. When it was just the two of them. Just them, and a whole world of dark.

"We'd better be getting back to Sam." Dean says finally, and he turns and starts walking back to the car. Castiel's footsteps scuffling leaves behind him.

So Dean can't see them sharing a bed, a coffee, going to a movie or any of that other crap.

But right now he can see Cas in the front seat of his car, heading back to Sam, to life as they know it.

Maybe everything else can come after.


End file.
